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CONTENTS 
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CULTURE AND ANARCHY 
PREFACE G(TGOOO ies saat eso eee areas aK: 
INTRODUCTIONS 44) coal, ong, ee 35 
\ CHAPTER I. SWEETNESS AND LIGHT........ 39 
\\Cuarrer II. Domne as One Lixgs...... Nan Oo 


\CuapTer III. Barsartians, PHILISTINES, Popu- = 


CHAPTER V. Porro Unum Est NEcESSARIUM 144 
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Cuaprer VI. Our Liperay PRAcTITIONERS... 164 


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INTRODUCTION 


“THE tastes and ideas of one generation,” Matthew 
Arnold once wrote, “‘are not those of the next. This 
next generation arrives;—first its sharpshooters, its quick- 
witted, audacious light troops; then the elephantine main 
body. The imposing array of its predecessor it confidently 
assails, riddles it with bullets, passes over its body. It 
goes hard then with many once popular reputations, with 
authorities once oracular.” 

Sharpshooters of the present generation have invaded 
the Victorian scene and have been extraordinarily aggres- 
sive, riddling reputations and questioning authorities 
which, fifty years ago, were considered oracular. In the 
general havoc which they have left in their wake, how has 
Matthew Arnold fared? While many of his contemporaries 
are suffering from our critical invasion, he persists: serene, 
Olympian, safe. Essays which were published in England 
and America in 1922, the centenary of his birth, united 
in proclaiming him a major prophet; indeed, H. G. Wells, 
some few years earlier, even went so far as to say, “Had we 
listened to Matthew Arnold, we might have avoided the 
Great War.” As a poet he is still a delight; as a social 
critic he lives because he urged what many people are 
coming to believe; that democracies tend inevitably to 
anarchy unless they are permeated by intelligence and 
tolerance—by what Arnold himself called “sweetness 
and light.” 

To use his own lines, he was 

“brought up and rear’d in hours 
Of change, alarm, surprise. .. .” 
Vii 


Vill Introduction 


His contact with modern social and political movements 
led to his belief in the healing power of culture for times 
troubled by restless agitations. Born on Christmas Eve, 
1822, the second child and eldest son of Thomas Arnold, 
his earliest years were passed at his birthplace, Laleham, 
a little village on the Thames not far from London, and at 
Rugby where, in 1828, his family moved when his father 
was appointed headmaster of the famous public school 
in that town. In 1836 he spent a few months at Winches- 
ter School but was transferred to Rugby where, for the 
following four years, he continued his preparation for the 
university. 

During those early years, two chief formative influences 
may be seen. The first was that of his father, one of the 
greatest of modern schoolmasters, who, by making Rugby 
School a commonwealth in which boys governed them- 
selves morally and socially, invested it with an “idea.” 
Many conservative people regarded him as an arch-radical 
because he himself vigorously engaged in political and 
social movements of the time. He communicated to his 
son and other Rugbeians a profound interest in such 
matters. The son never forgot the tragic experience of 
his father’s sudden death in 1842, and in a beautiful elegy 
“Rugby Chapel,” written fifteen years later, paid glowing 
tribute to his father’s noble character and inspiration. 
‘The other prime influence upon him was that of Words- 
worth whose near neighbor the Arnolds became after 1832 
when Dr. Arnold built “‘Fox How,” the family home of 
the Arnolds. “It is not for nothing,” Matthew Arnold 
wrote towards the close of his life, “that one has been 
brought up in the veneration of a man so truly worthy of 
homage, that one has seen him, and heard him, lived in 
his neighborhood, and been familiar with his country. 
No Wordsworthian has a tenderer affection for this pure 


Introduction 1X 
rd 
and sage master than I.” His father tended to inspire him 
towards a life of activity; Wordsworth, who became a 
kind of foster-father to him after Dr. Armmold’s death, 
towards a contemplative life. In the course of time these 
two tendencies conflicted in him, causing some of the 
painful spiritual struggle so markedly evident in his poetry. 
“Ah! Two desires toss about 
The poet’s feverish blood, 


One drives him to the world without, 
And one to solitude.” 


In 1841, he entered Oxford as a Balliol Scholar. His 
father had had some misgivings about sending him to 
Oxford because he strenuously disapproved the course 
which Tractarianism, a Catholic revival, was taking there, 
but he may have found some slight comfort in the thought 
that at Balliol there was a group of Rugbeians who were 
indoctrinating it with Arnoldian liberalism. What finally 
overcame Dr. Arnold’s scruples, however, was a fundamen- 
tal faith that at Oxford “a man was made master of three 
or four great books for life’ —and among them, Anistotle. 
That he was right, so far as his son was concerned, is 
apparent from the fact that one cannot read very much 
of Matthew Armold’s prose without becoming increasingly 
aware that Aristotle was one of his frmest guides in matters 
of thought, taste, and conduct. 

During the three years of his undergraduate career he 
held aloof from the turmoils in which he found his friends 
engaged; discovered for himself much that was winsome 
and lovely in the sermons and personality of John Henry 
Newman, the gifted leader of the Tractarians; spent much 
of his time rowing on Oxford streams and tramping over 
the Oxford hills; and, although somewhat desultory in 
applying himself to prescribed readings, ranged far and 
wide in the work of modern writers, discovering for him- 


x Introduction 


self Emerson, George Sand, Goethe, Senancour, de Musset, 
and Beranger. In 1844 he took his A. B. and his A. M. 
the following year. He disappointed many of his friends 
by failing to win first class honors, yet he always remem- 
bered his Oxford days as the freest, the happiest days of 
his life, and later wrote two exquisite poems which vividly 
recalled them, “The Scholar Gypsy” and “Thyrsis”. 
Like Rugby, Oxford left a deep mark on him. Both made 
him essentially a socially and politically minded man; and 
it is not strange, therefore, that after brief experiences as 
Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and schoolmaster at 
Rugby, he entered political life in 1847 as secretary to 
Lord Lansdowne, an eminent Liberal statesman. Five 
years later he was appointed an Inspector of Schools, an 
office which he retained for the greater part of his life; 
and in the same year he married Frances Lucy Wightman, 
the daughter of an English judge. 

In 1849 he began his literary career which spanned forty 
of the most interesting years of the Victorian era. It was 
the year following a series of revolutionary outbreaks in 
Europe; the Paris Revolution which initiated the Second 
French Republic, the abortive German revolts on the 
Rhine, and the last riots of Chartism in England. The 
period which followed was marked by vast changes of 
thought throughout Europe but especially in England; 
the chief agents of which were higher criticism of the 
Bible, the theory of evolution—somewhat loosely called 
‘Darwinism,’ technological and scientific inventions, and 
the spread of democracy. 

In his poetry and critical essays, one may see how 
Arnold’s mind brooded over these changes; how inevitably, 
in spite of a wish to contemplate only the classic beauty 
and peace of the Greek age of Pericles, he was irresistibly 
drawn to the observation and study of political and social 


Introduction xl 


transformations going on all about him. After publishing 
two unsuccessful books of poetry—“ The Strayed Reveller”’ 
(1849) and “Empedocles on Etna” (1852)—in which he 
gave expression to the distress caused by changes of 
belief, he won public recognition by his “Poems” (1853) 
in which he made a judicious selection from the two 
earlier volumes and added two of his greatest poems, 
“Sohrab and Rustum” and “The Scholar Gypsy.” 
Another volume, “Poems, Second Series” (1855) which 
included “ Balder Dead” and “‘Stanzas from the Grande 
Chartreuse,” extended his reputation and led to his 
appointment two years later to the Chair of Poetry at 
Oxford. He held that office for the following ten years. 
Since it was not necessary for him to reside at the Uni- 
versity, he continued his work as Inspector of Schools, 
visiting all parts of the Kingdom, and went up to Oxford 
only three or four times a year to deliver his occasional 
lectures. During his occupancy of the Chair he laid the 
foundations of his fame as one of the most significant of 
literary critics by learning the fundamental lesson which 
any critic of permanent significance must learn—the 
lesson of detachment, of subordination of self, of renounce- 
ment. He began his lectures with a criticism of romantic 
tendencies in English poetry—tendencies which, he be- 
lieved, over-emphasized sensuous at the expense of moral 
and intellectual experience; and urged his contemporaries 
to recognize the eternally modern or “adequate” element 
in Greek and Latin literature. 

The failure of ‘‘Merope” (1858), an earnest imitation 
of a Greek drama, awakened him to a realization of the 
futility, the state of mind of the country being what it was, 
of attemping to introduce a neo-Hellenic revival in English 
poetry. In 1860, therefore, he delivered a Parthian shot 
at romanticism in his lectures, “‘On Translating Homer”, 


Xi Introduction 


originally given as Oxford lectures during 1859. At the 
very moment when he was turning his creative energies to 
other themes, an opportunity for closer contact with Euro- 
pean ideas was given him by the first of two appointments 
to serve on Commissions to investigate schools and uni- 
versities on the Continent. In the course of work inciden- 
tal to that appointment, he had many interviews with 
distinguished French and German statesmen and writers, 
not only on educational matters, but also on the general 
trend of European thought. It is impossible to ignore the 
effect of these conversations upon him. He returned to 
England with his mind full of ideas, and anxious to do 
something to avert what he thought was an impending 
disaster to society. He began by including, in a treatise 
reporting the results of his findings abroad, an essay criti- 
cising the trend of modern democracy. The American 
Civil War and the discontent of the British masses under 
the leadership of John Bright seemed to lend pertinency 
to his criticism. 

After 1861, political and social criticism gradually 
found expression in his Oxford lectures, some of which 
were published in 1865 as “Essays in Criticism, First 
Series.” In that volume he first proposed his solution of 
social problems by suggesting the efficacy of “culture” 
which he defined as “contact with the best that has been 
thought and said in the world.”” What democracy needed, 
he urged, was intelligence and patience, both of which 
were fruits of culture. He treated this idea more fully 
from an ethnological point of view in his Oxford lectures, 
“On Celtic Literature” (1867), in which he incidentally 
contrasted, not altogether favorably to the English, the 
national character of his countrymen with that of the 
French and also with that of the Germans. In both of 
these books his social criticism was somewhat obliquely 


Introduction xi 


introduced; it was, that is to say, subordinated to an 
apparent discussion of literary subjects. So firmly con- 
vinced was he, however, of British apathy and indifference 
to the re-shaping of modern conditions and ideas that in 
March, 1866, he abandoned his oblique manner and 
pressed his social and political criticism more pointedly in 
his essay, “My Countrymen,” published in “‘ The Corn- 
hill Magazine.” That essay was needlessly aggressive 
and therefore provoked many hostile replies. Arnold at 
once saw that if he were to be at all fruitful in the work to 
which he now applied himself he must write in a less antag- 
onistic manner. He therefore changed his tactics from the 
frontal to the flank attack and conceived the brilliant 
notion of doing so in a series of satiric letters which he 
printed in “The Pall Mall Gazette.” They were later 
(1871) collected and republished as “‘ Friendship’s Garland.” 
His genial humor is nowhere, perhaps, shown to better 
advantage than in these imaginary letters supposed to 
have been written by “a young lion of the press” concern- 
ing the views on England held by a young German, “ Ar- 
minius von Thunder-ten-Tronkh” who represents “‘geist”’ 
or intelligence. 

In the course of the publication of the “Arminius” 
letters, Arnold delivered his last Oxford lecture, June 15, 
1867, ‘Culture and its Enemies,” which was published 
the following month in “The Cornhill Magazine.” Later, 
when it was made the first chapter of “Culture and 
Anarchy,” its title was changed to “‘Sweetness and Light.” 
Two important replies were made to it shortly after it 
appeared in “The Cornhill”; one by Henry Sidgwick, a 
Cambridge don, who published his criticism, ‘The Prophet 
of Culture,” in “‘MacMillan’s Magazine” for August, 
1867; and the other, “Culture: a Dialogue,” by Frederic 
Harrison, a young Oxford disciple of Comte, in “The 


XIV Introduction 


Fortnightly Review” for November, 1867. These two 
criticisms prompted Arnold to write and to publish in 
“The Cornhill” during the later months of 1867 and the 
early months of 1868 the remaining chapters of what has 
since become “Culture and Anarchy.” There he replied 
to Professor Sidgwick and to Mr. Harrison, and at the 
same time applied the idea of culture to the specific needs 
of the time. In 1869, Arnold collected these essays, 
changed their titles to those of the chapters as they now 
appear, added an Introduction, a Preface, a chapter en- 
titled “Our Liberal Practitioners,” and a Conclusion, 
and entitled his book, “ Culture and Anarchy.” 

When the first chapter was taking shape in his mind, he 
wrote his mother that he was “‘becoming more and more 
conscious of having something to do, and of a resolution 
to doit.” Until his death in 1888, with the exception of 
some fugitive but notable essays on purely literary themes, 
he gave most of his powers to carrying out this “‘resolu- 
tion.” To some extent his critics helped to determine 
his course, just as they had done in the case of “Culture 
and Anarchy.” In clearing up some of their ambiguities 
and misconceptions he was led into two fields, the religious 
and the political, in which he gave fuller expansion to 
ideas suggested in “‘Culture and Anarchy.” “St. Paul and 
Protestantism” (1870) was confessedly an outgrowth of 
his treatment of Protestantism in Chapter IV of “Culture 
and Anarchy,” and in turn led to “Literature and Dogma” 
(1873), ““God and the Bible” (1875), and “‘Last Essays on 
Church and Religion” (1877). Concurrently with the 
writing of these books he completed the curve he had 
projected in “Culture and Anarchy” by publishing in 
contemporary magazines articles which discussed current 
political issues. Some of these articles were republished 
in “‘Mixed Essays” (1879) and in “‘Irish Essays” (1882). 


Introduction xv 


In 1883 he retired from his Inspectorship of Schools and 
made a lecturing tour in America where he delivered the 
three lectures which are now printed in “Discourses in 
America” (1884). In April, 1888, he died from a disease 
which he may have inherited from his father. Some book 
reviews and prefaces for poetry anthologies which he 
wrote in the last years of his life were posthumously 
published as ‘‘Essays in Criticism, Second Series.” 

As we read all of his work to-day, we marvel at its unity; 
it is like a variegated tapestry in which, as we reflect upon 
it, the pattern becomes constantly clearer. Indeed, the 
more it is read, the more it appears to be all of a piece; 
each essay bound to the rest, but compact, terse, and 
beautiful. All of his prose of the second period appeared 
in a time of unusual controversial activity—‘the fighting 
seventies” as some one has called them. ‘“‘ Those years— 
say from 1860 to 1890,’—Lord Morley wrote in his 
“Recollections,” ‘““were an animated, hopeful, interesting, 
and, on the whole, either by reason of, or in spite of its 
perpetual polemics, a happy generation . . . a generation 
of intrepid effort forward.” England was becoming a 
theatre of conflicting philosophies. The influence of the 
great triumvirate of the preceding generation—Mill, 
Carlyle, and Newman—still persisted, but younger cham- 
pions now crowded the scene whose embattled tensity is 
recalled by the names of Huxley, William Morris, Spencer, 
Pater, Oscar Wilde, Bradlaugh, Morley, Leslie Stephen, 
Harrison, Tyndall, Swinburne. In the midst of these and 
other gifted and enterprising contemporaries, Matthew 
Arnold sensibly held to his course, rigorously developed 
his own line of thought and refused to be distracted from it. 

One of his most distinguished friends, Lord Morley, 
has somewhere said that one’s impression of a writer may 
exist apart from anything that he has written—that we 


XV Introduction 


often tend to associate certain notions, feelings, or prej- 
udices with the very name of a writer. In some respects 
this 1s true of Arnold. He is known at least by name to 
many who may never have read a line of his poetry or 
prose and has passed into common speech as “the prophet 
of culture.”” His brilliancy in coining pat phrases at once 
gave him currency; Disraeli, indeed, told him at one time 
that he had become a classic during his lifetime. People 
still quote his epithets and phrases more or less glibly but 
although their use of them may not always tally with 
Arnold’s, their very prevalence indicates his persistence. 

Then, too, many people read him again and again if 
for no other reason than for sheer delight in his supple and 
transparent style. But is this the secret of his continuing 
influence? One can hardly believe that style alone will 
save a writer from the critical fusillade of our generation. 
Mere stylists are left severely alone if they have nothing 
to say. Perhaps, then, his secret may be found in some 
firm, exact, systematized view of things? His chief critic, 
Frederic Harrison, took him to task for lacking “a philos- 
ophy based on inter-dependent, subordinate, and coherent 
principles.” Genially, though to be sure with a touch of 
irony, Arnold admitted the truth of this observation but 
suggested that he, too, was “still engaged in trying to 
clear and educate himself.” For systematic philosophers 
he had no great respect merely because they were syste- 
matic. ‘‘A philosopher’s real power over mankind,” he 
wrote in another essay, “‘resides, not in his metaphysical 
formulas, but in the spirit and tendencies which led him to 
adopt these formulas.” The spirit and tendencies which 
led him to adopt his own formulas are expressed in his 
most familiar one, “sweetness and light.”” What he said 
of another is strikingly true of himself: “Because he 
loved light, and did not prefer to it any little private 


oe 


Introduction XVli 


darkness of his own, he found light; his eye was single, 
and therefore his whole body was full of light. And because 
he loved light, he was also full of happiness.’”’ He has 
become, therefore, a Name, a Character, a Power; a kind 
of presiding genius for those who would live in the spirit 
and yet have intimate contact with society. 


If we wish to become acquainted with Arnold’s thought 
and method in their main outlines, we can hardly do better 
than to become thoroughly acquainted with ‘‘ Culture and 
Anarchy” which, it has been suggested, capped his earlier 
and marked the beginning of his later work. 

“Culture and Anarchy” is a handbook for Liberals by 
one who was a Liberal but a Liberal with a difference. 
“T am a Liberal,” Arnold wrote, “but I am a Liberal 
tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement.” 
Liberalism was then on the verge of becoming what it has 
in many quarters since become: in politics, an obstinate 
persistence in tinkering away on political machinery; in 
society, the pursuit of chimeras which are delightful to 
chase but enervating and disappointing; in religion, a 
dilettantism or else cool indifference; in art, the anarchic 
severance of reflective power from the mere recording or 
expression of the data of experience. These, alas! it has 
become instead of being a search for original inspiration 
and strength through reflection and renouncement. Be- 
cause he wanted to save Liberalism in all of its manifes- 
tations, because he wanted to improve the spiritual quality 
of modern society, Arnold wrote his book, the whole scope 
of which was “‘to recommend culture as the great help 
out of our present difficulties.” 

These “present difficulties” referred particularly to the 
aftermath of the great Reform Bill of 1867, which extended 
the franchise to almost a million new voters among the 


XVul Introduction 


working class of England and Wales, the second phase of 
the democratization of modern England. During his 
early manhood, Arnold had watched the rising tide of 
democracy with considerable apprehension, largely because 
of its unedifying effects in America, but when Disraeli’s 
famous bill was passed he believed that the time had come 
for him to press his doctrine of culture with greater direct- 
ness and power. If anarchy was not to prevail, anarchy 
in the sense of “‘doing as one likes,” it was imperative for 
every one to cultivate the spirit of sanity and co-operation 
with the State which culture fosters. 

In this sense, “‘Culture and Anarchy” was an instrument 
for culture. Always felicitous and urbane, Arnold is, per- 
haps, at his best in this book. He is at his best because 
of his mastery of literary strategy; because, in touching 
matters about which we are all very sensitive, he is so 
delicately discriminative, so deft in logic, so winning in 
persuasion. Though the tone of “Culture and Anarchy” 
is often bantering, cocky, and controversial, with now and 
then a genial play of dialectic in replying to critics, Arnold 
never loses control of his material or forgets his intention. 

The main argument of the book is developed in chap- 
ters II to V, and divides into two parts. In content, 
Chapters II and III are mainly political while Chap- 
ters IV and V are mainly spiritual or religious. Both 
sections logically expand ideas suggested in the first 
chapter, ‘“Sweetness and Light,” which contrasts faith in 
culture with what Arnold called faith in “‘machinery,” 
the various forms of which he enumerates and discusses; 
freedom, wealth, population, physical health, religious 
organizations, liberalism as a party creed, democracy 
and philosophical systems. He defines culture as an effort 
towards perfection, “through all the voices of human 
experience which have been heard upon it, of art, science, 


- 


Introduction xIX 


poetry, philosophy, as well as of religion.” He also 
points out that culture works both for inward expansion in 
the individual and for general expansion in society. 
General expansion of society through the power of 
culture is the theme of Chapters IT and III and is largely 
determined by Arnold’s reply to Frederic Harrison who 
had asserted “that a man with Arnold’s theories is full of 
antipathy to the rougher or coarser movements going on 
all around him.” Arnold disputes this but insists that 
culture is sceptical of precipitate action which a false idea 
of freedom inspires. Chapter II, “Doing as One Likes” 
1s, therefore, a criticism of this false notion of freedom; 
“false” because it ignores the need of subscribing to the 
idea of the State. In stating what this idea is, Arnold 
re-defined what he had learned at Oxford from Aristotle; 
“the nation in its collective and corporate character, 
entrusted with stringent powers for the general advan- 
tage, and controlling individual wills in the name of an 
interest wider than that of individuals . . . the organ of 
our collective best sense, of our national right reason.” 
With this concept of the State as a criterion, he then 
points out the tendency of modern society to disintegrate 
into its component classes, each of which presumes to 
consider its interests of paramount importance, and to 
act as though it were “‘a center of authority.” In examin- 
ing the “virtuous mean” of each class—another reminder 
of Aristotle—he finds that none can be so considered. 
Chapter II], “Barbarians, Philistines, Populace,”’ divides 
into two parts; the first, organically related to the pre- 
ceding chapter, continues in a more playful mood the criti- 
cism of the three classes of British society indicated in the 
title; the second part of the chapter extends the search 
for a centre of authority to other social powers; to contem- 
porary literature, religion, politics, education, and news- 


xx Introduction 


papers. May it be found in any of these? No, replies 
Arnold, because each reflects national habits and practice. 
It is necessary, therefore, he says, “‘to go a little deeper, 
and to find, beneath our actual habits and practice the 
very ground and cause out of which they spring.” 

Inward expansion of the individual therefore becomes 
the theme of Chapters IV and V, which are in effect a reply 
to Professor Henry Sidgwick, who had said that what was 
most needed in “‘the present difficulties” was not sweetness 
and light but “fire and strength.” Arnold replies that the 
English already have sufficient fire and strength, indeed 
that these are the chief virtues of the English, that fire 
and strength alone do not make for totality, for perfection. 
In criticizing these qualities Arnold amplifies in some 
degree his criticism of the English character which he had 
already given in his essays, “The Function of Criticism at 
the Present Time” and in ““On Celtic Literature,” and here 
and there makes allusion to them. For “fire,” he substi- 
tutes the word energy; for “‘strength,” the word honesty. 
The English, he says, have inordinately developed their 
native tendencies for energy and honesty through too 
exclusive contact with Hebrew genius as revealed in the 
Bible, and since the ancient Hebrews were also character- 
ized by energy and honesty, he gave these aptitudes the 
significant term of “Hebraism.” These aptitudes, however 
good in themselves, he says are not sufficient; in order that 
the English may secure an harmonious inward develop- 
ment they need to be supplemented by the effort to “see 
a thing in and for itself as it really is,” a characteristic of 
the ancient Greeks; hence the term of “Hellenism” is 
applied to it. “‘These two powers,” Arnold wrote, ‘“‘we 
may regard as in some sense rivals—rivals not by the 
necessity of their own nature, but as exhibited in man 
and his history—and rivals dividing the empire of the. 


e 


Introduction XX 


world between them . . . Hebraism and Hellenism—be- 
tween these two points of influence move our world. At 


one time it feels more powerfully the attraction of one of 
them, at another time of the other; and it ought to be, 


though it never is, evenly divided between them.” Al- 
though their aim is identical—the search for perfection— 
their method is different; Hellenism makes for ‘‘spontane- 
ity of consciousness,” Hebraism for “‘strictness of con- 
science.” The theme, therefore, of Chapter V, ‘Porro 
Unum Est Necessarium”, is the pointing out of this ‘‘one 
thing necessary”; to cultivate the Hellenic spirit which 


the Anglo-Saxon world has for so long missed. “To get™ 


rid of one’s ignorance, to see things as they are, and by 
seeing them as they are in their beauty, is the simple and 
attractive ideal which Hellenism holds out before human 
nature; and from the simplicity and charm of this ideal, 
Hellenism and human life in the hands of Hellenism is 
invested with a kind of aérial ease, clearness and radiancy; 
they are what we call ‘sweetness and light.’”’ 

The general line of thought which Arnold proposed for 
himself was thus completed by the end of Chapter V; but 
there remained for him the task of applying it specifically 
to current political questions. Chapter VI, “Our Liberal 
Practitioners” is, therefore, a pendant. In it he discusses 
the disestablishment of the Irish Church, the Real Estate 
Intestacy Bill, the agitation to permit a man to marry 
his deceased wife’s sister, and Free Trade. The upshot 
of his comment is this; how futile for a liberal to dissipate 
his energy and his influence in such trifling matters at a 
time when the Conservatives were in power and the 
Liberals at their nadir! A short concluding chapter is 
in the nature of a summary. 

Such, briefly, is the line of thought covered by “Cul- 
ture and Anarchy.” What value does it have for our 


XX Introduction 


day? When it was published it made a deep impression, 
and the many editions since printed testify to its continu- 
ing interest. Although it was primarily a social “tract for 
the times,” containing many references chiefly addressed 
to the generation for which it was written, it has, never- 
theless, a very real and pertinent appeal for our own day 
and especially for Americans, because it is still true of us, 
in large measure, that “‘as the strongest and most vital 
part of English Philistinism was the Puritan and He- 
braising middle class, and that its Hebraising keeps it 
from culture and totality, so it is notorious that the people 
of the United States issues from this class and reproduces 
its tendencies—its narrow conception of man’s spiritual 
range and of his one thing needful. From Maine to Florida, 
and back again, all America Hebraises.” 

In the midst of much confusion and social restlessness, 
when so many are prone to rush forward with schemes of 
reform not wholly thought through, modern readers will 
find in “‘Culture and Anarchy,” a remarkably purifying 
and steadying quality. They will be inspired to become 
true friends of culture, not expecting “‘to take the be- 
lievers in action by storm, or to be visibly and speedily 
important, and to rule and cut a figure in the world,” but 
they will more than ever seek to keep their minds even 
and the balance true. 

WILiiaM S. KNICKERBOCKER. 


PREFACE 


(1869) 


My foremost design in writing this Preface is to address 
a word of exhortation to the Society for Promoting Chris- 
tian Knowledge. In the essay which follows, the reader 
will often find Bishop Wilson quoted. To me and to the 
members of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowl- 
edge his name and writings are still, no doubt, familiar. 
But the world is fast going away from old-fashioned people 
of his sort, and I learnt with consternation lately from a 
brilliant and distinguished votary of the natural sciences, 
that he had never so much as heard of Bishop Wilson, 
and that he imagined me to have invented him. At a 
moment when the Courts of Law have just taken off the 
embargo from the recreative religion furnished on Sundays 
by my gifted acquaintance and others, and when St. 
Martin’s Hall and the Alhambra will soon be beginning 
again to resound with their pulpit-eloquence, it distresses 
one to think that the new lights should not only have, in 
general, a very low opinion of the preachers of the old 
religion, but that they should have it without knowing 
the best that these preachers can do. And that they are 
in this case is owing in part, certainly, to the negligence 
of the Christian Knowledge Society. In the old times they 
used to print and spread abroad Bishop Wilson’s Maxims 
of Piety and Christianity. The copy of this work which 
I use is one of their publications, bearing their imprint, 
and bound in the well-known brown calf which they made 
familiar to our childhood; but the date of my copy is 
1812. I know of no copy besides, and I believe the work 
3 


+ Culture and Anarchy 


is no longer one of those printed and circulated by the 
Society.1 Hence the error, flattering, I own, to me per- 
sonally, yet in itself to be regretted, of the distinguished 
physicist already mentioned. 

But Bishop Wilson’s Maxims deserve to be circulated 
as a religious book, not only by comparison with the cart- 
loads of rubbish circulated at present under this designa- 
tion, but for their own sake, and even by comparison with 
the other works of the same author. Over the far better 
known Sacra Privata they have this advantage, that they 
were prepared by him for his own private use, while the 
Sacra Privata were prepared by him for the use of the 
public. The Maxims were never meant to be printed, 
and have on that account, like a work of, doubtless, far 
deeper emotion and power, the Meditations of Marcus 
Aurelius, something peculiarly sincere and first-hand 
about them. Some of the best things from the Maxims 
have passed into the Sacra Prizvata. Still, in the Maxims, 
we have them as they first arose; and whereas, too, in 
the Sacra Privata the writer speaks very often as one of the 
clergy, and as addressing the clergy, in the Maxims he 
almost always speaks solely as a man. I am not saying 
a word against the Sacra Privata, for which I have the 
highest respect; only the Maxims seem to me a better and 
more edifying book still. They should be read, as Joubert 
says Nicole should be read, with a direct aim at practice. 
The reader will leave on one side things which, from the 
change of time and from the changed point of view which 
the change of time inevitably brings Mith it, no longer 
suit him; enough will remain to servé as a sample of the 
very best, perhaps, which our nation and race can do in 
the way of religious writing. M. Michelet makes it a 


1 The Christian Knowledge Society has, since 1869, republished the Maxims 
of Bishop Wilson. 


Preface 5 


reproach to us that, in all the doubt as to the real author 
of the Imitation, no one has ever dreamed of ascribing 
that work to an Englishman. It is true, the Imitation 
could not well have been written by an Englishman; 
the religious delicacy and the profound asceticism of that 
admirable book are hardly in our nature. This would be 
more of a reproach to us if in poetry, which requires, no 
less than religion, a true delicacy of spiritual perception, 
our race had not done great things; and if the Imitation, 
exquisite as it is, did not, as I have elsewhere remarked, 
belong to a class of works in which the perfect balance of 
human nature is lost, and which have therefore, as spirit- 
ual productions, in their contents something excessive 
and morbid, in their form something not thoroughly sound. 
On a lower range than the Jmitation, and awakening in 
our nature chords less poetical and delicate, the Maxims 
of Bishop Wilson are, as a religious work, far more solid. 
To the most sincere ardour and unction, Bishop Wilson 
unites, in these Maxims, that downright honesty and plain 
good sense which our English race has so powerfully ap- 
plied to the divine impossibilities of religion; by which 
it has brought religion so much into practical life, and has 
done its allotted part in promoting upon earth the kingdom 
of God. . 

With ardour and unction religion, as we all know, may 
still be fanatical; with honesty and good sense, it may still 
be prosaic; and the fruit of honesty and good sense united 
with ardour and unction is often only a prosaic religion 
held fanatically. Bishop Wilson’s excellence lies in a 
balance of the four qualities, and in a fulness and perfec- 
tion of them, which makes this untoward result impos- 
sible. His unction is so perfect, and in such happy alliance 
with his good sense, that it becomes tenderness and fervent 
charity. His good sense is so perfect, and in such happy 


6 Culture and Anarchy 


alliance with his unction, that 1t becomes moderation and 
insight. While, therefore, the type of religion exhibited 
in his Maxims is English, it is yet a type of a far higher 
kind than is in general reached by Bishop Wilson’s coun- 
trymen; and yet, being English, it is possible and attain- 
-able for them. And so I conclude as I began, by saying 
that a work of this sort is one which the Society for 
Promoting Christian Knowledge should not suffer to 
remain out of print and out of currency. 

And now to pass to the matters canvassed in the follow- 
ing essay. The whole scope of the essay is to recommend 
culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; 
culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means 
of ; getting to know, on all the matters which most concern 
us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; 
and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and 
free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which 
we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagin- 
ing that there is a virtue in following them staunchly 
which makes up for the mischief of following them mechan- 
ically. This, and this alone, is the scope of the following 
essay. And the culture we recommend 1s, above all, an 
inward operation. 

But we are often supposed, when we criticise by the 
help of culture some imperfect doing or other, to have 
in our eye some well-known rival plan of doing, which we 
want to serve and recommend. ‘Thus, for instance, be- 
cause we have freely pointed out the dangers and incon- 
veniences to which our literature is exposed in the absence 
of any centre of taste and authority like the French Acad- 
emy, it is constantly said that we want to introduce here 
in England an institution like the French Academy. We 
have, indeed, expressly declared that we wanted no such 
thing; but let us notice how it is just our worship of 


* 


Preface 7 


machinery, and of external doing, which leads to this 
charge being brought; and how the inwardness of culture 
makes us seize, for watching and cure, the faults to which 
our want of an Academy inclines us, and yet prevents us 
from trusting to an arm of flesh, as the Puritans say,— 
from blindly flying to this outward machinery of an 
Academy, in order to help ourselves. For the very same 
culture and free inward play of thought which shows how 
the Corinthian style, or the whimsies about the One 
Primeval Language, are generated and strengthened in 
the absence of an Academy, shows us, too, how little any 
Academy, such as we should be likely to get, would cure 
them. Every one who knows the characteristics of our 
national life, and the tendencies so fully discussed in the 
following pages, knows exactly what an English Academy 
would be like. One can see the happy family in one’s 
mind’s eye as distinctly as if it were already constituted. 
Lord Stanhope, the Dean of St. Paul’s,! the Bishop of 
Oxford,? Mr. Gladstone, the Dean of Westminster, Mr. 
Froude, Mr. Henry Reeve,—everything which 1s influen- 
tial, accomplished, and distinguished; and then, some fine 
morning, a dissatisfaction of the public mind with this 
brilliant and select coterie, a flight of Corinthian leading 
articles, and an irruption of Mr. G. A. Sala. Clearly, this 
is not what will do us good. The very same faults,—the 
want of sensitiveness of intellectual conscience, the dis- 
belief in right reason, the dislike of authority,—which 
have hindered our having an Academy and have worked in- 
juriously in our literature, would also hinder us from mak- 
ing our Academy, if we established it, one which would 
really correct them. And culture, which shows us truly 
the faults to be corrected, shows us this also just as truly. 


1 The late Dean Milman. 
2 The late Bishop Wilberforce. 


8 Culture and Anarchy 


Natural, as we have said, the sort of misunderstanding 
just noticed is; yet our usefulness depends upon our being 
able to clear it away, and to convince those who mechan- 
ically serve some stock notion or operation, and thereby 
go astray, that it is not culture’s work or aim to give the 
victory to some rival fetish, but simply to turn a free and 
fresh stream of thought upon the whole matter in question. 
In a thing of more immediate interest, just now, than any 
question of an Academy, the like misunderstanding pre- 
vails; and until it is dissipated, culture can do no good 
work in the matter. When we criticise the present opera- 
tion of disestablishing the Irish Church, not by the power 
of reason and justice, but by the power of the antipathy 
of the Protestant Nonconformists, English and Scotch, 
to establishments, we are called enemies of the Noncon- 
formists, blind partisans of the Anglican Establishment, 
possessed with the one desire to help the clergy and to 
harm the Dissenters. More than a few words we must 
give to showing how erroneous are these charges; because 
if they were true, we should be actually subverting our 
own design, and playing false to that culture which it is 
our very purpose to recommend. 

Certainly we are no enemies of the Nonconformists; 
..for, on the contrary, what we aim at is their perfection. 
But culture, which is the study of perfection) leads us, as 
we in the following pages have shown, to conceive of true 
human perfection as a harmonious perfection, developing 
all sides of our humanity; and as a general perfection, 
developing all parts of our society. For if one member 
suffer, the other members must suffer with it; and the 
fewer there are that follow the true way of salvation, the 
harder that way 1s to find. And while the Nonconformists, 
the successors and representatives of the Puritans, and 
like them staunchly walking by the best light they have, 


Preface 9 


make a large part of what is strongest and most serious 
in this nation, and therefore attract our respect and in- 
terest, yet all which, in what follows, is said about Hebra- 
ism and Hellenism, has for its main result to show how our 
Puritans, ancient and modern, have not enough added to 
their care for walking staunchly by the best light they 
have, a care that that light be not darkness; how they have 
developed one side of their humanity at the expense of all 
others, and have become incomplete and mutilated men in 
consequence. Thus falling short of harmonious perfection, 
they fail to follow the true way of salvation. Therefore 
that way 1s made the harder for others to find, general 
perfection is put further off out of our reach, and the con- 
fusion and perplexity, in which our society now labours, 
is increased by the Nonconformists rather than diminished 
by them. So, while we praise and esteem the zeal of the 
Nonconformists in walking staunchly by the best light 
they have, and desire to take no whit from it, we seek to 
add to this what we call sweetness and light, and to develop 
their full humanity more perfectly. To seek this is cer- 
tainly not to be the enemy of the Nonconformists. 

But now, with these ideas in our head, we come upon 
the operation for disestablishing the Irish Church by the 
power of the Nonconformists’ antipathy to religious es- 
tablishments and endowments. And we see Liberal states- 
men, for whose purpose this antipathy happens to be 
convenient, flattering it all they can; saying that though 
they have no intention of laying hands on an Establish- 
ment which is efficient and popular, like the Anglican 
Establishment here in England, yet it is in the abstract 
a fine and good thing that religion should be left to the 
voluntary support of its promoters, and should thus gain 
in energy and independence; and Mr. Gladstone has no 
words strong enough to express his admiration of the 


10 Culture and Anarchy 


refusal of State-aid by the Irish Roman Catholics, who 
have never yet been seriously asked to accept it, but who 
would a good deal embarrass him if they demanded it. 
And we see philosophical politicians with a turn for swim- 
ming with the stream, and philosophical divines with the 
same turn, seeking to give a sort of grand stamp of gener- 
ality and solemnity to this antipathy of the Noncon- 
formists, and to dress it out as a law of human progress 
in the future. Now, nothing can be pleasanter than swim- 
ming with the stream; and we might gladly, if we could, 
try in our unsystematic way to take part in labours at 
once so philosophical and so popular. But we have got 
fixed in our minds that a more full and harmonious develop- 
ment of their humanity is what the Nonconformists most 
want, that narrowness, onesidedness, and incompleteness 
is what they most suffer from; in a word, that in what we 
call provinctality they abound, but in what we may call 
totality they fall short. 

And they fall short more than the members of Establish- 
ments. The great works by which, not only in literature, 
art, and science generally, but in religion itself, the human 
spirit has manifested its approaches to totality and to a 
full, harmonious perfection, and by which it stimulates 
and helps forward the world’s general perfection, come, 
not, from Nonconformists, but from men who either belong 
to Establishments or have been trained in them. A Non- 
conformist minister, the Rev. Edward White, who has 
written a temperate and well-reasoned pamphlet against 
Church Establishments, says that “the unendowed and 
unestablished communities of England exert full as much 
moral and ennobling influence upon the conduct of states- 
men as that Church which is both established and en- 
dowed.” ‘That depends upon what one means by moral . 
and ennobling influence. The believer in machinery may 


Preface 11 


think that to get a Government to abolish Church-rates 
or to legalise marriage with a deceased wife’s sister is to 
exert a moral and ennobling influence upon Government. 
But a lover of perfection, who looks to inward ripeness for 
the true springs of conduct, will surely think that as 
Shakspeare has done more for the inward ripeness of our 
statesmen than Dr. Watts, and has, therefore, done more 
to moralise and ennoble them, so an Establishment which 
has produced Hooker, Barrow, Butler, has done more to 
moralise and ennoble English statesmen and their conduct 
than communities which have produced the Nonconformist 
divines. The fruitful men of English Puritanism and Non- 
conformity are men who were trained within the pale of 
the Establishment,—Milton, Baxter, Wesley. A genera- 
tion or two outside the Establishment, and Puritanism 
produces men of national mark no more. With the same 
doctrine and discipline, men of national mark are produced 
in Scotland; but in an Establishment. With the same 
doctrine and discipline, men of national and even European 
mark are produced in Germany, Switzerland, France; but 
in Establishments. Only two religious disciplines seem 
exempted, or comparatively exempted, from the operation 
of the law which appears to forbid the rearing, outside of 
national Churches, of men of the highest spiritual sig- 
nificance. These two are the Roman Catholic and the 
Jewish. And these, both of them, rest on Establishments, 
which, though not indeed national, are cosmopolitan; and 
perhaps here, what the individual man does not lose by 
these conditions of his rearing, the citizen, and the State 
of which he is a citizen, loses. 

What, now, can be the reason of this undeniable pro- 
vincialism of the English Puritans and Protestant Non- 
conformists? Men of genius and character are born and 
reared in this medium as in any other. From the faults 


12 Culture and Anarchy 


of the mass such men will always be comparatively free, 
and they will always excite our interest; yet in this medium 
they seem to have a special difficulty in breaking through 
what bounds them, and in developing their totality. 
Surely the reason is, that the Nonconformist is not in 
contact with the main current of national life, like the 
member of an Establishment. In a matter of such deep 
and vital concern as religion, this separation from the 
main current of the national life has peculiar importance. 
In the following essay we have discussed at length the 
tendency in us to Hebratse, as we call it; that is, to sacrifice 
all other sides of our being to the religious side. ‘This 
tendency has its cause in the divine beauty and grandeur 
of religion, and bears affecting testimony to them. But 
we have seen that it has dangers for us, we have seen that 
it leads to a narrow and twisted growth of our religious 
side itself, and to a failure in perfection. But if we tend to 
Hebraise even in an Establishment, with the main current 
of national life flowing round us, and reminding us in all 
ways of the variety and fulness of human existence,— 
-by a Church which is historical as the State itself is his- 
torical, and whose order, ceremonies, and monuments 
reach, like those of the State, far beyond any fancies and 
devisings of ours; and by institutions such as the Uni- 
versities, formed to defend and advance that very culture 
and many-sided development which it is the danger of 
Hebraising to make us neglect,—how much more must 
we tend to Hebraise when we lack these preventives. One 
may say that to be reared a member of a national Church 
is in itself a lesson of religious moderation, and a help 
towards culture and harmonious perfection. Instead of 
battling for his own private forms for expressing the in- 
expressible and defining the undefinable, a man takes 
those which have commended themselves most to the 


Preface 13 


religious life of his nation; and while he may be sure that 
within those forms the religious side of his own nature may 
find its satisfaction, he has leisure and composure to satisfy 
other sides of his nature as well. 

But with the member of a Nonconforming or self- 
made religious community, how different! The sectary’s 
eigene grosse Erfindungen, as Goethe calls them,—the 
precious discoveries of himself and his friends for express- 
ing the inexpressible and defining the undefinable in 
peculiar forms of their own, cannot but, as he has volun- 
tarily chosen them, and is personally responsible for 
them, fill his whole mind. He ts zealous to do battle for 
them and affirm them; for in affirming them he affirms 
himself, and that is what we all like. Other sides of his 
being are thus neglected, because the religious side, always 
tending in every serious man to predominance over our 
other spiritual sides, is in him made quite absorbing and 
tyrannous by the condition of self-assertion and challenge 
which he has chosen for himself. And just what is not 
essential in religion he comes to mistake for essential, 
and a thousand times the more readily because he has 
chosen it of himself; and religious activity he fancies to 
consist in battling for it. All this leaves him little leisure 
or inclination for culture; to which, besides, he has no 
great institutions not of his own making, like the Univer- 
sities connected with the National Church to invite him, 
but only such institutions, as, like the order and discipline 
of his religion, he may have invented for himself, and in- 
vented under the sway of the narrow and tyrannous notions 
of religion fostered in him as we have seen. Thus, while 
a national establishment of religion favours totality, 
hole-and-corner forms of religion (to use an expressive 
popular word) inevitably favour provincialism. 

But the Nonconformists, and many of our Liberal 


14 Culture and Anarchy 


friends along with them, have a plausible plan for getting 
rid of this provincialism, if, as they can hardly quite 
deny, it exists. ‘‘Let us all be in the same boat,” they 
cry; ‘‘open the Universities to everybody, and let there 
be no establishment of religion at all!’’ Open the Univer- 
sities by all means; but, as to the second point about 
establishment, let us sift the proposal a little. It does 
seem at first a little like that proposal of the fox, who 
had lost his own tail, to put all the other foxes in the same 
case by a general cutting off of tails; and we know that 
moralists have decided that the right course here was, 
not to adopt this plausible suggestion, and cut off tails 
all round, but rather that the other foxes should keep 
their tails, and that the fox without a tail should get one. 
And so we might be inclined to urge, that, to cure the 
evil of the Nonconformists’ provincialism, the right way 
can hardly be to provincialise us all round. 

However, perhaps we shall not be provincialised. For 
Mr. White says that probably, “‘when all good men alike 
are placed in a condition of religious equality, and the 
whole complicated iniquity of Government Church pat- 
ronage is swept away, more of moral and ennobling 
influence than ever will be brought to bear upon the action 
of statesmen.” 

We already have an example of religious equality in 
our colonies. “In the colonies,” says The Times, “we 
see religious communities unfettered by State-control, 
and the State relieved from one of the most troublesome 
and irritating responsibilities.” But America is the great 
example alleged by those who are against establishments 
for religion. Our topic at this moment is the influence 
of religious establishments on culture; and it is remarkable 
that Mr. Bright, who has taken lately to representing 
himself as, above all, a promoter of reason and of the simple 


Preface 15 


natural truth of things, and his policy as a fostering of 
the growth of intelligence,—just the aims, as is well known, 
of culture also,—Mr. Bright, in a speech at Birmingham 
about education, seized on the very point which seems to 


‘concern our topic, when he said: “‘I believe the people of 


the United States have offered to the world more valuable 
information during the last forty years, than all Europe 


\ put together.”’” So America, without religious establish- 


ments, seems to get ahead of us all, even in light and the 
things of the mind. 

On the other hand, another friend of reason and the 
simple natural truth of things, M. Renan, says of America, 
in a book he has recently published, what seems to con- 
flict violently with what Mr. Bright says. Mr. Bright 
avers that not only have the United States thus informed 
Europe, but they have done it without a great apparatus 
of higher and scientific instruction, and by dint of all 
classes in America being “sufficiently educated to be 
able to read, and to comprehend, and to think; and that, 
I maintain, is the foundation of all subsequent progress.” 
And then comes M. Renan, and says: “The sound instruc- 
tion of the people is an effect of the high culture of certain 
classes. The countries which, like the United States, have 
created a considerable popular instruction without any serious 
higher instruction, will long have to exptate this fault by their 
intellectual mediocrity, their vulgarity of manners, their 
superficial spirit, their lack of general intelligence.’’* 

Now, which of these two friends of light are we to be- 
lieve? M. Renan seems more to have in view what we 
ourselves mean by culture; because Mr. Bright always 
has in his eye what he calls “‘a commendable interest”’ 


1“Tes pays qui, comme les Etats-Unis, ont creé un enseignement populaire 
considérable sans instruction supérieure sérieuse, expieront longtemps encore 
leur faute par leur médiocrité intellectuelle, leur grossiéreté de mceurs, leur esprit 
superficiel, leur manque d’intelligence générale.” 


16 Culture and Anarchy 


in politics and in political agitations. As he said only the 
other day at Birmingham: “‘At this moment,—in fact, 
I may say at every moment in the history of a free country, 
—there is nothing that is so much worth discussing as 
politics.” And he keeps repeating, with all the powers of 
his noble oratory, the old story, how to the thoughtfulness 
and intelligence of the people of great towns we owe all 
our improvements in the last thirty years, and how these 
improvements have hitherto consisted in Parliamentary 
reform, and free trade, and abolition of Church rates, 
and so on; and how they are now about to consist in getting 
rid of minority-members, and in introducing a free break- 
fast-table, and in abolishing the Irish Church by the 
power of the Nonconformists’ antipathy to establishments, 
and much more of the same kind. And though our 
pauperism and ignorance, and all the questions which 
are called social, seem now to be forcing themselves upon 
his mind, yet he still goes on with his glorifying of the 
great towns, and the Liberals, and their operations for 
the last thirty years. It never seems to occur to him that 
the present troubled state of our social life has anything 
to do with the thirty years’ blind worship of their nostrums 
by himself and our Liberal friends, or that it throws any 
doubts upon the sufficiency of this worship. But he thinks 
that what is still amiss is due to the stupidity of the 
Tories, and will be cured by the thoughtfulness and 
intelligence of the great towns, and by the Liberals going 
on gloriously with their political operations as before; 
or that it will cure itself. So we see what Mr. Bright 
means by thoughtfulness and intelligence, and in what 
matter, according to him, we are to grow in them. And, 
no doubt, in America all classes read their newspaper, 
and take a commendable interest in politics, more than 
here or anywhere else in Europe. 


Preface 17 


But in the following essay we have been led to doubt 
the sufficiency of all this political operating, pursued 
mechanically as our race pursues it; and we found that 
general intelligence, as M. Renan calls it, or, as we say, 
attention to the reason of things, was just what we were 
without, and that we were without it because we wor~ 
shipped our machinery so devoutly. Therefore, we con- 
clude that M. Renan, more than Mr. Bright, means by 
reason and intelligence the same thing as we do. And 
when M. Renan says that America, that chosen home of 
newspapers and politics, is without general intelligence, 
we think it likely, from the circumstances of the case, 
that this is so; and that in the things of the mind, and in 
culture and totality, America, instead of surpassing us 
all, falls short. 

And,—to keep to our point of the influence of religious 
establishments upon culture and a high development of 
our humanity,—we can surely see reasons why, with all 
her energy and fine gifts, America does not show more of 
this development, or more promise of this. In the follow- 
ing essay it will be seen how our society distributes itself 
into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace; and America 
is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and 
the Populace nearly. This leaves the Philistines for the 
great bulk of the nation;—a livelier sort of Philistine than 
ours, and with the pressure and false ideal of our Barbarians 
taken away, but left all the more to himself and to have 
his full swing. And as we have found that the strongest 
and most vital part of English Philistinism was the Puritan 
and Hebraising middle class, and that its Hebraising keeps 
it from culture and totality, so it is notorious that the 
people of the United States issues from this class, and 
reproduces its tendencies,—its narrow conception of man’s 
spiritual range and of his one thing needful. From Maine 


18 Culture and Anarchy 


to Florida, and back again, all America Hebraises. Dif- 
ficult as it is to speak of a people merely from what one 
reads, yet that, I think, one may without much fear of 
contradiction say. I mean, when in the United States 
any spiritual side in man is wakened to activity, it is 
generally the religious side, and the religious side in a 
narrow way. Social reformers go to Moses or St. Paul 
for their doctrines, and have no notion there is anywhere 
else to go to; earnest young men at schools and universities, 
instead of conceiving salvation as a harmonious perfection 
only to be won by unreservedly cultivating many sides 
in us, conceive of it in the old Puritan fashion, and fling 
themselves ardently upon it in the old, false ways of this 
fashion, which we know so well, and such as Mr. Ham- 
mond, the American revivalist, has lately at Mr. Spur- 
geon’s Tabernacle been refreshing our memory with. 

Now, if America thus Hebraises more than either 
England or Germany, will any one deny that the absence 
of religious establishments has much to do with it? We 
have seen how establishments tend to give us a sense of 
a historical life of the human spirit, outside and. beyond 
our own fancies and feelings; how they thus tend to suggest 
new sides and sympathies in us to cultivate; how, further, 
by saving us from having to invent and fight for our own 
forms of religion, they give us leisure and calm to steady 
our view of religion itself,—the most overpowering of 
objects, as it is the grandest,—and to enlarge our first 
crude notions of the one thing needful. But, in a serious 
people, where every one has to choose and strive for his 
own order and discipline of religion, the contention about 
these non-essentials occupies his mind. His first crude 
notions about the one thing needful do not get purged, 
and they invade the whole spiritual man in him, and then, 
making a solitude, they call it heavenly peace. 


Preface 19 


I remember a Nonconformist manufacturer, in a town 
of the Midland counties, telling me that when he first 
came there, some years ago, the place had no Dissenters; 
but he had opened an Independent chapel in it, and now 
Church and Dissent were pretty equally divided, with 
sharp contests between them. I said that this seemed a 
pity. “A pity?” cried he; “not at all! Only think of all 
the zeal and activity which the collision calls forth!”’ ‘Ah, 
but, my dear friend,” I answered, “‘only think of all the 
nonsense which you now hold quite firmly, which you 
would never have held if you had not been contradicting 
your adversary in it all these years!’ The more serious 
the people, and the more prominent the religious side in 
it, the greater is the danger of this side, if set to choose out 
forms for itself and fight for existence, swelling and spread- 
ing till it swallows all other spiritual sides up, intercepts 
and absorbs all nutriment which should have gone to them, 
and leaves Hebraism rampant in us and Hellenism stamped 
out. 
Culture, and the harmonious perfection of our whole 
being, and what we call totality, then become quite 
secondary matters. And even the institutions, which 
should develop these, take the same narrow and partial 
view of humanity and its wants as the free religious com- 
munities take. Just as the free churches of Mr. Beecher 
or Brother Noyes, with their provincialism and want of 
centrality, make mere Hebraisers in religion, and not 
perfect men, so the university of Mr. Ezra Cornell, a 
really noble monument of his munificence, yet seems to 
rest on a misconception of what culture truly is, and to be 
calculated to produce miners, or engineers, or architects, 
not sweetness and light. 

And, therefore, when Mr. White asks the same kind 
of question about America that he has asked about Eng- 


20 Culture and Anarchy 


land, and wants to know whether, without religious 
establishments, as much is not done in America for the 
higher national life as is done for that life here, we answer 
in the same way as we did before, that as much is not done. 
Because to enable and stir up people to read their Bible 
and the newspapers, and to get a practical knowledge of 
their business, does not serve to the higher spiritual life 
of a nation so much as culture, truly conceived, serves; 
and a true conception of culture is, as M. Renan’s words 
show, just what America fails in. 

To the many who think that spirituality, and sweetness, 
and light, are all moonshine, this will not appear to matter 
much; but with us, who value them, and who think that 
we have traced much of our present discomfort to the 
want of them, it weighs a great deal. So not only do we 
say that the Nonconformists have got provincialism and 
lost totality by the'want of a religious establishment, but 
we say that the very example which they bring forward to 
help their case makes against them; and that when they 
triumphantly show us America without religious establish- 
ments, they only show us a whole nation touched, amidst 
all its greatness and promise, with that provincialism 
which it is our aim to extirpate in the English Noncon- 
formists. 

But now to evince the disinterestedness which culture 
teaches us. We have seen the narrowness generated in 
Puritanism by its hole-and-corner organisation, and«we 
propose to cure it by bringing Puritanism more into con- 
tact with the main current of national life. Here we are 
fully at one with the Dean of Westminster; and, indeed, 
he and we were trained in the same school to mark the 
narrowness of Puritanism, and to wish to cure it. But 
he and others seem disposed simply to give to the present 
Anglican Establishment a character the most latitudi- 


Preface Q1 


narian, as it is called, possible; availing themselves for 
this purpose of the diversity of tendencies and doctrines 
which does undoubtedly exist already in the Anglican 
formularies; and then they would say to the Puritans: 
“Come all of you into this liberally conceived Anglican 
Establishment.” But to say this is hardly, perhaps, to 
take sufhcient account of the course of history, or of the 
strength of men’s feelings in what concerns religion, or of 
the gravity which may have come to attach to points of 
religious order and discipline merely. When Mr. White 
talks of “sweeping away the whole complicated iniquity 
of Government Church patronage,” he uses language 
which has been forced upon him by his position, but 
which is devoid of all real solidity. But when he talks 
of the religious communities “which have for three hun- 
dred years contended for the power of the congregation 
in the management of their own affairs,” then he talks 
history; and his language has behind it, in my opinion, 
facts which make the latitudinarianism of our Broad 
Churchmen quite illusory. 

Certainly, culture will never make us think it an essential 
of religion whether we have in our Church discipline “a 
popular authority of elders,” as Hooker calls it, or whether 
we have Episcopal jurisdiction. Certainly, Hooker him- 
self did not think it an essential; for in the dedication of 
his Ecclesiastical Polity, speaking of these questions of 
church-discipline which gave occasion to his great work, 
he says they are “in truth, for the greatest part, such 
silly things, that very easiness doth make them hard to be 
disputed of in serious manner.” Hooker’s great work 
against the impugners of the order and discipline of the 
Church of England was written (and this is too indis- 
tinctly seized by many who read it), not because Episco- 
palianism is essential, but because its impugners main- 


Q2 Culture and Anarchy 


tained that Presbyterianism is essential, and that Episco- | 
palianism is sinful. Neither the one nor the other is either _ 
essential or sinful, and much may be said on behalf of 
both. But what is important to be remarked 1s, that both. 
were in the Church of England at the Reformation, and that 
Presbyterianism was only extruded gradually. We have 
mentioned Hooker, and nothing better illustrates what 
has just been asserted than the following incident in 
Hooker’s own career, which every one has read, for it is 
related in Isaac Walton’s Life of Hooker, but of which, 
probably, the significance has been fully alii by very 
few of those who have read it. 

Hooker was through the influence of AcsibEnee Whit- 
gift appointed, in 1585, Master of the Temple; but a great 
effort had first been made to obtain the place for a Mr. 
Walter Travers, well known in that day, though now it is 
Hooker’s name which alone preserves his. This Travers 
was then afternoon-lecturer at the Temple. The Master 
whose death made the vacancy, Alvey, recommended on 
his death-bed Travers for his successor. The Society was 
favourable to Travers, and he had the support of the 
Lord Treasurer Burghley. Although Hooker was ap- 
pointed to the Mastership, Travers remained afternoon- 
lecturer, and combated in the afternoons the doctrine 
which Hooker preached in the mornings. Now, this 
Travers, originally a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, 
afterwards afternoon-lecturer at the Temple, recom- 
mended for the Mastership by the foregoing Master whose 
opinions, it is said, agreed with his, favoured by the 
Society of the Temple and supported by the Prime 
Minister,—this Travers was not an Episcopally ordained 
clergyman at all. He was a Presbyterian, a partisan of the 
Geneva church-discipline, as it was then called, and “had 
taken orders,’ says Walton, ‘‘by the Presbyters in Ant- 


Preface 23 


werp.” In another place Walton speaks of his orders yet 
more fully:—“He had disowned,” he says, “the English 
Established Church and Episcopacy, and went to Geneva, 
and afterwards to Antwerp, to be ordained minister, as 
he was by Villers and Cartwright and others the heads of 
a congregation there; and so came back again more con- 
firmed for the discipline.” Villers and Cartwright are in 
like manner examples of Presbyterianism within the 
Church of England, which was common enough at that 
time. But perhaps nothing can better give us a lively 
sense of its presence there than this history of Travers, 
which is as if Mr. Binney were now ! afternoon-reader at 
Lincoln’s Inn or the Temple; were to be a candidate, 
favoured by the Benchers and by the Prime Minister, 
for the Mastership; and were only kept out of the post by 
the accident of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s influence 
with the Queen carrying a rival candidate. 
Presbyterianism, with its popular principle of the 
power of the congregation in the management of their 
own affairs was extruded from the Church of England, 
and men like Travers can no longer appear in her pulpits. 
Perhaps if a government like that of Elizabeth, with 
secular statesmen like the Cecils, and ecclesiastical states- 
men like Whitgift, could have been prolonged, Presby- 
terianism might,“by a wise mixture of concession and 
firmness, have been absorbed in the Establishment. Lord 
Bolingbroke, on a matter of this kind a very clear-judging 
and impartial witness, says, in a work far too little read, 
his Remarks on English History:—‘‘The measures pursued 
and the temper observed in Queen Elizabeth’s time tended 
to diminish the religious opposition by a slow, a gentle, 
and for that very reason an effectual progression. There 
was even room to hope that when the first fire of the 
1 1869. 


Q4 Culture and Anarchy 


Dissenters’ zeal was passed, reasonable terms of union 
with the Established Church might be accepted by such 
of them as were not intoxicated with fanaticism. These 
were friends to order, though they disputed about it. If 
these friends of Calvin’s discipline had been once incor- 
porated with the Established Church, ‘the remaining 
sectaries would have been of little moment, either for 
numbers or reputation; and the very means which were 
proper to gain these friends were likewise the most effectual 
to hinder the increase of them, and of the other sectaries 
in the meantime.” The,temper and ill judgment of 
the Stuarts made shipwreck of all policy of this kind. 
Yet speaking even of the time of the Stuarts, but their 
early time, Clarendon says that if Bishop Andrewes had 
succeeded Bancroft at Canterbury, the disaffection of 
separatists might have been stayed and healed. This, 
however, was not to be; and Presbyterianism, after 
exercising for some years the law of the strongest, itself 
in Charles the Second’s reign suffered under this law, and 
was finally cast out from the Church of England. 

Now the points of church-discipline at issue between 
Presbyterianism and Episcopalianism are, as has been 
said, not essential. They might probably once have been 
settled in a sense altogether favourable to Episcopalianism. 
Hooker may have been right in thinking that there were 
in his time circumstances which made it essential that they 
should be settled in this sense, though the points in them- 
selves were not essential. But by the very fact of the 
settlement not having then been effected, of the breach 
having gone on and widened, of the Nonconformists not 
having been amicably incorporated with the Establish- 
ment but violently cast out from it, the circumstances are 
now altogether altered. Isaac Walton, a fervent Church- 
man, complains that “ the principles of the Nonconform- 


Preface 25 


ists grew at last to such a height and were vented so 
daringly, that, beside the loss of life and limbs, the Church 
and State were both forced to use such other severities 
as will not admit of an excuse, if 1t had not been to prevent 
confusion and the perilous consequences of it.”” But those 
very severities have of themselves made union on an 
Episcopalian footing impossible. Besides, Presbyterian- 
ism, the popular authority of elders, the power of the 
congregation in the management of their own affairs, has 
that warrant given to it by Scripture and by the proceed- 
ings of the early Christian Churches, it is so consonant 
with the spirit of Protestantism which made the Reforma- 
tion and which has great strength in this country, it is so 
predominant in the practice of other Reformed Churches, 
it was so strong in the original Reformed Church of 
England, that one cannot help doubting whether any 
settlement which suppressed it could have been really 
permanent, and whether it would not have kept appearing 
again and again, and causing dissension. 

Well, then, if culture is the disinterested endeavour 
after man’s perfection, will it not make us wish to cure 
the provincialism of the Nonconformists, not by rendering 
Churchmen provincial along: with them, but by letting 
their popular church-discipline, formerly present in the 
national Church and still present in the affections and 
practice of a good part of the nation, appear in the national 
Church once more; and thus to bring Nonconformists 
into contact again, as their greater fathers were, with the 
main stream of national life? Why should not a Presby- 
terian Church, based on this considerable and important, 
though not essential principle, of the congregation’s share 
in the church-management, be established,—with equal 

«rank for its chiefs with the chiefs of Episcopacy, and with 
admissibility of its ministers, under a revised system of 


26 Culture and Anarchy 


patronage and preferment to benefices,—side by side with 
the Episcopal Church, as the Calvinist and Lutheran 
Churches are established side by side in France and 
Germany? Such a Presbyterian Church would unite 
the main bodies of Protestants who are now separatists; 
and separation would cease to be the law of their religious 
order. And thus,—though this concession on a really con- 
siderable point of difference,—that endless splitting into 
hole-and-corner churches on quite inconsiderable points 
of difference, which must prevail so long as separatism is 
the first law of a Nonconformist’s religious existence, 
would be checked. Culture would then find a place among 
English followers of the popular authority of Elders, 
as it has long found it among the followers of Episcopal 
jurisdiction. And this we should gain by merely recognis- 
ing, regularising, and restoring an element which appeared 
once in the reformed national Church, and which is con- 
siderable and national enough to have a sound claim 
to appear there still. 

So far, then, is culture from making us unjust *to 
the Nonconformists because it forbids us to worship 
their fetishes, that it even leads us to propose to do more 
for them than they themselves venture to claim. It leads 
us, also, to respect what is solid and respectable in their 
convictions. Not that the forms in which the human 
spirit tries to express the inexpressible, or the forms by 
which man tries to worship, have or can have, as has been 
said, for the follower of perfection, anything necessary 
or eternal. If the New Testament and the practice of 
the primitive Christians sanctioned the popular form of 
church-government a thousand times more expressly than 
they do, if the Church since Constantine were a thousand 
times more of a departure from the scheme of primitive 
Christianity than it can be shown to be, that does not 


Preface QY 


at all make, as is supposed by men in bondage to the 
letter, the popular form of church-government alone and 
always sacred and binding, or the work of Constantine 
a thing to be regretted. 

What is alone and always sacred and binding for 
man is the making progress towards his total perfection; 
and the machinery by which he does this varies in value 
according as it helps him to doit. The planters of Christi- 
anity had their roots in deep and rich grounds of human 
life and achievement, both Jewish and also Greek; and 
had thus a comparatively firm and wide basis amidst all 
the vehement inspiration of their mighty movement and 
change. By their strong inspiration they carried men off 
the old basis of life and culture, whether Jewish or Greek, 
and generations arose who had their roots in neither 
world, and were in contact therefore with no full and 
great stream of human life. If it had not been for some 
such change as that of the fourth century, Christianity 
might have lost itself in a multitude of hole-and-corner 
churches like the churches of English Nonconformity 
after its founders departed; churches without great men, 
and without furtherance for the higher life of humanity. 
At a critical moment came Constantine, and _ placed 
Christianity,—or let us rather say, placed the human 
spirit, whose totality was endangered,—in contact with 
the main current of human life. And his work was 
justified by its fruits, in men like Augustine and Dante, 
and indeed in all the great men of Christianity, Catholics 
or Protestants, ever since. 

And one may go beyond this. M. Albert Réville, 
whose religious writings are always interesting, says 
that the conception which .cultivated and philosophical 
Jews now entertain of Christianity and its Founder, 
is probably destined to become the conception which 


28 Culture and Anarchy 


Christians themselves will entertain. Socinians are fond 
of saying the same thing about the Socinian conception 
of Christianity. Now, even if this were true, it would 
still have been better for a man, during the last eighteen 
hundred years, to have been a Christian and a member of 
one of the great Christian communions, than to have been 
a Jew or a Socinian; because the being in contact with 
the main stream of human life is of more moment for a 
man’s total spiritual growth, and for his bringing to per- 
fection the gifts committed to him, which is his business 
on earth, than any speculative opinion which he may 
hold or think he holds. Luther,—whom we have called a 
Philistine of genius, and who, because he was a Philis- 
tine, had a coarseness and lack of spiritual delicacy which 
have harmed his disciples, but who, because he was a 
genius, had splendid flashes of spiritual insight,—Luther 
says admirably in his Commentary on the Book of Daniel: 
““A God is simply that whereon the human heart rests 
with trust, faith, hope, and love. If the resting is night, 
then the God too is right; if the resting is wrong, then 
the God too is illusory.” In other words, the worth of | 
what a man thinks about God and the objects of religion © 
depends on what the man 1s; and what the man 1s, de-_ 
pends upon his having more or less reached the measure | 
of a perfect and total man. 

Culture, disinterestedly seeking in its aim at perfec- 
tion to see things as they really are, shows us how worthy 
and divine a thing is the religious side in man, though it 
is not the whole of man. But while recognising the 
grandeur of the religious side in man, culture yet makes 
us also eschew an inadequate conception of man’s totality. 
Therefore to the worth and grandeur of the religious side 
in man, culture is rejoiced and willing to pay any tribute, 
except the tribute of man’s totality. Unless it is proved 


Preface 29 


that contact with the main current of national life is of 
no value (and we have shown that it is of the greatest 
value), we cannot safely, even to please the Nonconform- 
ists in a matter where we would please them as. much 
as possible, admit their doctrines of disestablishment and 
separation. 

- Culture, again, can be disinterested enough to perceive 
and avow, that for Ireland the ends of human perfection 
might be best served by establishing,—that is, by bring- 
ing into contact with the main current of the national 
lifeéj—the Roman Catholic and the Presbyterian Churches 
along with the Anglican Church. It can perceive and 
avow that we should really, in this way, be working to 
make reason and the will of God prevail; because we 
should be making Roman Catholics better citizens, and 
both Protestants and Roman Catholics larger-minded and 
more complete men. Undoubtedly there are great difh- 
culties in such a plan as this; and the plan is not one 
which looks very likely to be adopted. The Churchman 
must rise above his ordinary self in order to favour it. 
And the Nonconformist has worshipped his fetish of 
separatism so long that he is likely to wish to remain, like 
Ephraim, ‘“‘a wild ass alone by himself.” It is a plan 
more for a time of creative statesmen, like the time of 
Elizabeth, than for a time of instrumental statesmen like 
the present. The centre of power being where it is, our 
statesmen have every temptation, when they must act, to 
go along as they do with the ordinary self of those on whose 
favour they depend, to adopt as their own its desires, and 
to serve them with fidelity, and even, if possible, with 
ardour. This is the more easy for them, because there 
are not wanting,—and there never will be wanting,— 
thinkers to call the desires of the ordinary self of any 
great section of the community edicts of the national 


30 | Culture and Anarchy 


mind and laws of human progress, and to give them a 
general, a philosophic, and imposing expression. There- 
fore a plan such as that which we have indicated does 
not seem a plan so likely to find favour as a plan for 
abolishing the Irish Church by the power of the Non- 
‘conformists’ antipathy to establishments. 

But although culture makes us fond stickers to no 
machinery, not even our own, and therefore we are willing 
to grant that perfection can be reached without it,— 
with free churches as with established churches, and with 
instrumental statesmen as with creative statesmen,—yet 
perfection can never be reached without seeing things as 
they really are; and it is to this, therefore, and to no 
machinery in the world, that we stick. We insist that 
men should not mistake, as they are prone to mistake, 
their natural taste for the bathos for a relish for the sub- 
lime. And if statesmen, either with their tongue in their 
cheek or with a finé impulsiveness, tell people that their 
natural taste for the bathos is a relish for the sublime, 
there is the more need to tell them the contrary. 

It is delusion on this point which is fatal, and against 
delusion on this point culture works. It is not fatal to 
our Liberal friends to labour for free trade, extension of 
the suffrage, and abolition of church-rates, instead of 
graver social ends; but it is fatal to them to be told by 
their flatterers, and to believe, with our social condition 
what it is, that they have performed a great, a heroic 
work, by occupying themselves exclusively, for the last 
thirty years, with these Liberal nostrums, and that the 
right and good course for them now Is to go on occupying 
themselves with the like for the future. It is not fatal 
to Americans to have no religious establishments and no 
effective centres of high culture; but it is fatal to them to 
be told by their flatterers, and to believe, that they are 


Preface 31 


the most intelligent people in the whole world, when of 
intelligence, in the true and fruitful sense of the word, 
they even singularly, as we have seen, come short. It 
is not fatal to the Nonconformists to remain with their 
separated churches; but it is fatal to them to be told by 
their flatterers, and to believe, that theirs is the one true 
way of worshipping God, that provincialism and loss of 
totality have not come to them from following it, or that 
provincialism and loss of totality are not evils. It is 
not fatal to the English nation to abolish the Irish Church 
by the power of the Nonconformists’ antipathy to estab- 
lishments; but it is fatal to it to be told by its flatterers, 
and to believe, that it is abolishing it through reason and 
justice, when it is really abolishing it through this power: 
or to expect the fruits of reason and justice from any- 
thing but the spirit of reason and justice themselves. 
Now culture, because of its keen sense of what is really 
fatal, is all the more disposed to be rather indifferent 
about what is not fatal. And because machinery is the 
one concern of our actual politics, and an inward working, 
and not machinery, is what we most want, we keep ad- 
vising our ardent young Liberal friends to think less of 
machinery, to stand more aloof from the arena of politics 
at present, and rather to try and promote, with us, an 
inward working. They do not listen to us, and they rush 
into the arena of politics, where their merits, indeed, 
seem to be little appreciated as yet; and then they com- 
plain of the reformed constituencies, and call the new 
Parliament a Philistine Parliament. As if a nation, 
nourished and reared as ours has been, could give us, just 
yet, anything but a Philistine Parliament!—and would 
a Barbarian Parliament be even so good, or a Populace 
Parliament? For our part, we rejoice to see our dear old 
friends, the Hebraising Philistines, gathered in force in 


32 Culture and Anarchy 


the Valley of Jehoshaphat previous to their final conver- 
sion, which will certainly come. But, to attain this con- 
version, we must not try to oust them from their places 
and to contend for machinery with them, but we must 
work on them inwardly and cure their spirit. Ousted 
they will not be, but transformed. Ousted they do not 
deserve to be, and will not be. 

For the days of Israel are innumerable; and in its blame 
of Hebraising too, and in its praise of Hellenising, culture 
must not fail to keep its flexibility, and to give to its 
judgments that passing and provisional character which 
we have seen it impose on its preferences and rejections 
of machinery. Now, and for us, it is a time to Hellenise, 
and to praise knowing; for we have Hebraised too much, 
and have over-valued doing. But the habits and dis- 
cipline received from Hebraism remain for our race an 
eternal possession; and, as humanity is constituted, one 
must never assign to them the second rank to-day, with- 
out being prepared to restore to them the first rank to- 
morrow. Let us conclude by marking this distinctly. 

To walk staunchly by the best light one has, to be 
strict and sincere with oneself, not to be of the number 
of those who say and do not, to be in earnest,—this is 
the discipline by which alone man is enabled to rescue 
his life from thraldom to the passing moment and to his 
bodily senses, to ennoble it, and “to make it eternal. 
And this discipline has been nowhere so effectively taught 
as in the school of Hebraism. The intense and convinced 
energy with which the Hebrew, both of the Old and of 
the New Testament, threw himself upon his ideal of right- 
eousness, and which inspired the incomparable definition 
of the great Christian virtue, faith,—the substance of 
things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,—this 
energy of devotion to its ideal has belonged to Hebraism 


Preface 33 


alone. As our idea of perfection widens beyond the nar- 
row limits to which the over-rigour of Hebraising has 
tended to confine it, we shall yet come again to Hebraism 
for that devout energy in embracing our ideal, which 
alone can give to man the happiness of doing what he 
knows. “If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do 
them!’’—the last word for infirm humanity will always 
be that. For this word, reiterated with a power now sub- 
lime, now affecting, but always admirable, our race will, 
as long as the world lasts, return to Hebraism; and the 
Bible, which preaches this word, will for ever remain, 
as Goethe called it, not only a national book, but the 
Book of the Nations. Again and again, after what seemed 
breaches and separations, the prophetic promise to Jerusa- 
lem will still be true:—Lo, thy sons come, whom thou 
sentest away; they come gathered from the west unto the east 
by the word of the Holy One, rejoicing in the remembrance 


of God. 


r 





CULTURE AND ANARCHY 
INTRODUCTION 


In one of his speeches a short time ago, that fine speaker 
and famous Liberal, Mr. Bright, took occasion to have a 
fling at the friends and preachers of culture. ‘People 
who talk about what they call culture!” said he, contemp- 
tuously; ““‘by which they mean a smattering of the two 
dead languages of Greek and Latin.”’ And he went on to 
remark, in a strain with which modern speakers and writers 
have made us very familiar, how poor a thing this culture 
is, how little good it can do to the world, and how absurd 
it is for its possessors to set much store by it. And the 
other day a younger Liberal than Mr. Bright, one of a 
school whose mission it is to bring into order and system 
that body of truth with which the earlier Liberals merely 
fumbled, a member of the University of Oxford, and a 
very clever writer, Mr. Frederic Harrison, developed, in 
the systematic and stringent manner of his school, the 
thesis which Mr. Bright had propounded in only general 
terms. ‘‘Perhaps the very silliest cant of the day,” said 
Mr. Frederic Harrison, “‘is the cant about culture. Cul- 
ture is a desirable quality in a critic of new books, and 
sits well on a possessor of belles-lettres; but as applied to 
politics, it means simply a turn for small fault-finding, 
love of selfish ease, and indecision in action. The man 
of culture is in politics one of the poorest mortals alive. 
For simple pedantry and want of good sense no man is his 
equal. No assumption is too unreal, no end is too un- 
practical for him. But the active exercise of politics 
requires common sense, sympathy, trust, resolution, and 
enthusiasm, qualities which your man of culture has 
35 


36 Culture and Anarchy 


carefully rooted up, lest they damage the delicacy ot his 
critical olfactories. Perhaps they are the only class of 
responsible beings in the community who cannot with 
safety be entrusted with power.” 

Now for my part I do not wish to see men of culture 
asking to be entrusted with power; and, indeed, I have 
freely said, that in my opinion the speech most proper, 
at present, for a man of culture to make to a body of his 
fellow-countrymen who get him into a committee-room, 
is Socrates’s: Know thyself! and this is not a speech to be 
made by men wanting to be entrusted with power. For 
this very indifference to direct political action I have been 
taken to task by the Daily Telegraph, coupled, by a 
strange perversity of fate, with just that very one of the 
Hebrew prophets whose style I admire the least, and 
called “fan elegant Jeremiah.” It is because I say (to 
use the words which the Daily Telegraph puts in my 
mouth) :—*‘You mustn’t make a fuss because you have 
no vote,—that is vulgarity; you mustn’t hold big meetings 
to agitate for reform bills and to repeal corn laws,—that 
is the very height of vulgarity,’’—it is for this reason that 
I am called sometimes an elegant Jeremiah, sometimes a 
spurious Jeremiah, a Jeremiah about the reality of whose 
mission the writer in the Daily Telegraph has his doubts. 
It is evident, therefore, that I have so taken my line-as 
not to be exposed to the whole brunt of Mr. Frederic 
Harrison’s censure. Still, I have often spoken in praise 
of culture, I have striven to make all my works and ways 
serve the interests of culture. I take culture to be some- 
thing a great deal more than what Mr. Frederic Harrison 
and others call it: “‘a desirable quality in a critic of new 
books.” Nay, even though to a certain extent I am dis- 
posed to agree with Mr. Frederic Harrison, that men of 
culture are just the class of responsible beings in this 


Introduction 37 


community of ours who cannot properly, at present, be 
entrusted with power, I am not sure that I do not think 
this the fault of our community rather than of the men of 
culture. In short, although, like Mr. Bright and Mr. 
Frederic Harrison, and the editor of the Daily Telegraph, 
and a large body of valued friends of mine, I am a Liberal, 
yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflection, 
and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in 
culture. Therefore I propose now to try and inquire, in 
the simple unsystematic way which best suits both my 
taste and my powers, what culture really is, what good it 
can do, what is our own special need of it; and I shall 
seek to find some plain grounds on which a faith in culture, | 
—both my own faith in it and the faith of oa 
rest securely. 





CHAPTER I 


SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 


THE disparagers of culture make its motive curiosity; 
sometimes, indeed, they make its motive mere exclusiveness 
and vanity. The culture which is supposed to plume 
itself on a smattering of Greek and Latin is a culture which 
is begotten by nothing so intellectual as curiosity; it is 
valued either out of sheer vanity and ignorance or else 
as an engine of social and class distinction, separating its 
holder, like a badge or title, from other people who have 
not got it. No serious man would call this culture, or 
attach any value to it, as culture, at all. To find the real 
ground for the very different estimate which serious 
people will set upon culture, we must find some motive 
for culture in the terms of which may lie a real ambiguity; 
and such a motive the word curiosity gives us. 

I have before now pointed out that we English do not, 
like the foreigners, use this word in a good sense as well as 
in a bad sense. With us the word is always used in a 
somewhat disapproving sense. A liberal and intelligent 
eagerness about the things of the mind may be meant by 
a foreigner when he speaks of curiosity, but with us the 
word always conveys a certain notion of frivolous and 
unedifying activity. In the Quarterly Review, some little 
time ago, was an estimate of the celebrated French critic, 
M. Sainte-Beuve, and a very inadequate estimate it in my 
judgment was. And its inadequacy consisted chiefly in 
this: that in our English way it left out of sight the double 
sense really involved in the word curiosity, thinking enough 
was said to stamp M. Sainte-Beuve with blame if it was 
said that he was impelled in his operations as a critic by 

39 


40 Culture and Anarchy 


curiosity, and omitting either to perceive that M. Sainte- 
Beuve himself, and many other people with him, would 
consider that this was praiseworthy and not blameworthy, 
or to point out why it ought really to be accounted worthy 
of blame and not of praise. For as there is a curiosity about “ 
intellectual matters which is futile, and merely a disease, 
so there is certainly a curiosity,—a desire after the things 
of the mind simply for their own sakes and for the pleasure 
of seeing them as they are,—which is, in an intelligent — 
being, natural and laudable. Nay, and the very desire 
to see things as they are implies a balance and regulation 
of mind which is not often attained without fruitful effort, 
and which is the very opposite of the blind and diseased 
impulse of mind which is what we mean to blame when 
we blame curiosity. Montesquieu says: “The first motive 
which ought to impel us to study is the desire to augment 
the excellence of our nature, and to render an intelligent 
being yet more intelligent.’ This is the true ground to 
assign for the genuine scientific passion, however mani- 
fested, and for culture, viewed simply as a fruit of this 
passion; and it is a worthy ground, even though we let 
the term curiosity stand to describe it. 

But there is of culture another view, in which not solely 
the scientific passion, the sheer desire to see things-as they 
are, natural and proper in an intelligent being, appears 
as the ground of it. ‘There is a view in which all the love 
of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help, and 
beneficence, the desire for removing human error, clearing 
human confusion, and diminishing human misery, the 
noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier 
than we found it,—motives eminently such as are called 
social,—come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the 
main and pre-eminent part. Culture is then properly 
described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having 


Sweetness and Light 41 


its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection. 

It moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the 
scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the 
moral and social passion for doing good. As, in the first 
view of it, we took for its worthy motto Montesquieu’s 
words: ““To render an intelligent being yet more intelli- 
gent!’ so, in the second view of it, there is no better motto 
which it can have than these words of Bishop Wilson: 
“To make reason and the will of God prevail!” 

Only, whereas the passion for doing good is apt to be 
overhasty in determining what reason and the will of 
God say, because its turn is for acting rather than thinking 
and it wants to be beginning to act; and whereas it is apt 
to take its own conceptions, which proceed from its own 
state of development and share in all the imperfections 
and immaturities of this, for a basis of action; what dis- 
tinguishes culture is, that it 1s possessed by the scientific 
passion as well as by the passion of doing good; that it 
demands worthy notions of reason and the will of God, 
and does not readily suffer its own crude conceptions to 
substitute themselves for them. And knowing that no 
action or institution can be salutary and stable which is 
not based on reason and the will of God, it is not so bent 
on acting and instituting, even with the great aim of 
diminishing human error and misery ever before its 
thoughts, but that it can remember that acting and in- 
stituting are of little use, unless we know how and what 
we ought to act and to institute. 

This culture is more interesting and more far-reaching 
than that other, which is founded solely on the scientific 
passion for knowing. But it needs times of faith and ar- 
dour, times when the intellectual horizon is opening and 
widening all round us, to flourish in. And is not the close 
and bounded intellectual horizon within which we have 


42 Culture and Anarchy 


long lived and moved now lifting up, and are not new lights 
finding free passage to shine in upon us? For a long time 
there was no passage for them to make their way in upon 
us, and then it was of no use to think of adapting the 
world’s action to them. Where was the hope of making 
reason and the will of God prevail among people who had 
a routine which they had christened reason and the will 
of God, in which they were inextricably bound, and beyond 
which they had no power of looking? But now the iron 
force of adhesion to the old routine,—social, political, 
religious,—has wonderfully yielded; the iron force of 
exclusion of all which is new has wonderfully yielded. 
The danger now is, not that people should obstinately 
refuse to allow anything but their old routine to pass for 
reason and the will of God, but either that they should 
allow some novelty or ether to pass for these too easily, 
or else that they should underrate the importance of them 
altogether, and think it enough to follow action for its 
own sake, without troubling themselves to make reason 
and the will-of God prevail therein. Now, then, is the 
moment for culture to be of service, culture which believes 
in making reason and the will of God prevail, believes in 
perfection, is the study and pursuit of perfection, and is 
no longer debarred, by a rigid invincible exclusion of 
whatever is new, from getting acceptance for its ideas, 
simply because they are new. : 

The moment this view of culture is seized, the moment 
it is regarded not solely as the endeavour to see things 
as they are, to draw towards a knowledge of the uni- 
versal order which seems to be intended and aimed at 
in the world, and which it is a man’s happiness to go along 
with or his misery to go counter to,—to learn, in short, 
the will of God,—the moment, I say, culture 1s considered 
not merely as the endeavour to see and learn this, but as 


Sweetness and Light 43 


the endeavour, also, to make it prevail, the moral, social, 
and beneficent character of culture becomes manifest. 
The mere endeavour to see and learn the truth for our 
own personal satisfaction is indeed a commencement for 
making it prevail, a preparing the way for this, which 
always serves this, and is wrongly, therefore, stamped 
with blame absolutely in itself and not only in its cari- 
cature and degeneration. But perhaps it has got stamped 
with blame, and disparaged with the dubious title of 
curiosity, because in comparison with this wider endeavour 
of such great and plain utility it looks selfish, petty, and 
unprofitable. | 
And religion, the greatest and most important of the 
efforts by which the human race has manifested its im- 
pulse to perfect itself,—religion, that voice of the deepest 
human experience,—does not only enjoin and sanction 
the aim which is the great aim of culture, the aim of setting 
ourselves to ascertain what perfection is and to make it 
prévail; but also, in determining generally in what human 
perfection consists, religion comes to a conclusion identi- 
cal with that which culture,—culture seeking the de- 
termination of this question through all the voices of 
human experience which have been heard upon it, of art, 
science, poetry, philosophy, history, as well as of religion, 
in order to give a greater fulness and certainty to its 
solution,—likewise reaches. Religion says: The kingdom 
of God is within you; and culture, in like manner, places 
human perfection in an internal condition, in the growth 
and predominance of our humanity proper, as distin- 
guished from our animality. It places it in the ever-in- 
creasing efficacy and in the general harmonious expansion 
of those gifts of thought and feeling, which make the 
peculiar dignity, wealth, and happiness of human nature. 
As I have said on a former occasion: “It is in making 


AA, Culture and Anarchy 


endless additions to itself, in the endless expansion of 
its powers, in endless growth in wisdom and beauty, that 
the spirit of the human race finds its ideal. To reach this 
ideal, culture is an indispensable aid, and that is the true 
value of culture.” Not a having and a resting, but a 
growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection 
as culture conceives it; and here, too, it coincides with 
religion. 

And because men are all members of one great whole, 
and the sympathy which is in human nature will not 
allow one member to be indifferent to the rest or to have 
a perfect welfare independent of the rest, the expansion 
of our humanity, to suit the idea of perfectton which cul- 
ture forms, must be a general expansion. Perfection, as_...-” 
culture conceives it, is not possible while the individual 
remains isolated. The individual is required, under pain 
of being stunted and enfeebled in his own development 
if he disobeys, to carry others along with him in his march 
towards perfection, to be continually doing all he can to 
enlarge and increase the volume of the human stream 
sweeping thitherward. And here, once more, culture lays 
on us the same obligation as religion which says, as 
Bishop Wilson has admirably put it, that “to promote 
the kingdom of God is to increase and hasten one’s own 
happiness.”’ 

But, finally, perfection,—as culture from a thorough 
disinterested study of human nature and human experi- 
ence learns to conceive it,—is a harmonious expansion 
of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of 
human nature, and is not consistent with the over-develop- 
ment of any one power at the expense of the rest. Here 
culture goes beyond religion, as religion is generally con- 
ceived by us. : 

If culture, then, is a study of perfection, and of har- 


Sweetness and Light 45 


monious perfection, general perfection, and_ perfection 
which consists in becoming something rather than in 
having something, *in an inward condition of the mind 
and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances,—it 
is clear that culture, instead of being the frivolous and 
useless thing which Mr. Bright, and Mr. Frederic Harrison, 
and many other Liberals are apt to call it, has a very im- 
portant function to fulfil for mankind. And this function 
is particularly important in our modern world, of which 
the whole civilisation is, to a much greater degree than 
the civilisation of Greece and Rome, mechanical and ex- 
ternal, and tends constantly to become more so. But 
above all in our own country has culture a weighty part 
to perform, because here that mechanical character, which 
civilisation tends to take everywhere, is shown in the 
most eminent degree. Indeed nearly all the characters of 
perfection, as culture teaches us to fix them, meet in this 
country with some powerful tendency which thwarts 
them and sets them at defiance. The idea of perfection 
as an inward condition of the mind and spirit is at variance 
with the mechanical and material civilisation in esteem 
with us, and nowhere, as I have said, so much in esteem 
as with us. The idea of perfection as a general expansion 
of the human family is at variance with our strong indi- 
vidualism, our hatred of all limits to the unrestrained 
swing of the individual’s personality, our maxim of “every 
man for himself.’ Above all, the idea of perfection as 
a harmonious expansion of human nature is at. variance 
with our want of flexibility, with our inaptitude for seeing 
more than one side of a thing, with our intense energetic 
absorption in the particular pursuit we happen to be 
following. So culture has a rough task to achieve in this 
country. Its preachers hzve, and are likely long to have, 
a hard time of it, and they will much oftener be regarded, 


46 Culture and Anarchy 


for a great while to come, as elegant or spurious Jeremiahs 
than as friends and benefactors. That, however, will not 
prevent their doing in the end good service if they per- 
severe. And, meanwhile, the mode of action they have 
to pursue, and the sort of habits they must fight against, 
ought to be made quite clear for every one to see, who may 
be willing to look at the matter attentively and dis- 
passionately. 

Faith in machinery, is, I said, our besetting danger; 
often in machinery most absurdly disproportioned to 
the end which this machinery, if it is to do any good at 
all, is to serve; but always in machinery, as if it had a 
value in and for itself. What is freedom but machinery? 
what is population but machinery? what is coal but 
machinery? what are railroads but machinery? what is 
wealth but machinery? what are, even, religious organisa- 
tions but machinery? Now almost every voice in England 
is accustomed to speak of these things as if they were 
precious ends in themselves, and therefore had some of 
the characters of perfection indisputably joined to them. 
I have before now noticed Mr. Roebuck’s stock argu- 
ment for proving the greatness and happiness of England 
as she is, and for quite stopping the mouths of all gain- 
sayers. Mr. Roebuck is never weary of reiterating this 
argument of his, so I do not know why I should be weary 
of noticing it. “May not every man in England say what 
he likes?”—Mr. Roebuck perpetually asks; and that, he 
thinks, is quite sufficient, and when every man may say 
what he likes, our aspirations ought to be satisfied. But 
the aspirations of culture, which is the study of perfec- 
tion, are not satished, unless what men say, when they 
may say what they like, is worth saying,—has good in it, 
and more good than bad. In the same way the Times, 
replying to some foreign strictures on the dress, looks, 


Sweetness and Light 47 


and behaviour of the English abroad, urges that the 
English ideal is that every one should be free to do and 
to look just as he likes. But culture indefatigably tries, 
not.to make what each raw person may like the rule by 
which he fashions himself; but to draw ever nearer to a 
sense of what is indeed beautiful, graceful, and becoming, 
and to get the raw person to like that. 

And in the same way with respect to railroads and 
coal. Every one must have observed the strange lan- 
guage current during the late discussions as to the pos- 
sible failures of our supplies of coal. Our coal, thousands 
of people were saying, is the real basis of our national 
greatness; if our coal runs short, there 1s an end of the 
greatness of England. But what is greatness?—culture 
makes us ask. Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy 
to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward 
proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, in- 
terest, and admiration. If England were swallowed up 
by the sea to-morrow, which of the two, a hundred years 
hence, would most excite the love, interest, and admira- 
tion of mankind,—would most, therefore, show the evi- 
dences of having possessed greatness,—the England of 
- the last twenty years, or the England of Elizabeth, of 
a time of splendid spiritual effort, but when our coal, 
and our industrial operations depending on coal, were 
very little developed? Well, then, what an unsound 
habit of mind it must be which makes us talk of things 
like coal or iron as constituting the greatness of England, 
and how salutary a friend is culture, bent on seeing things 
as they are, and thus dissipating delusions of this kind 
and fixing standards of perfection that are real! 

Wealth, again, that end to which our prodigious works 
for material advantage are directed,—the commonest 
of commonplaces tells us how men are always apt to re- 


48 Culture and Anarchy 


gard wealth as a precious end in itself; and certainly 
they have never been so apt thus to regard it as they are 
in England at the present time. Never did people be- 
lieve anything more firmly than nine Englishmen out of 
ten at the present day believe that our greatness and wel- 
fare are proved by our being so very rich. Now, the use 
of culture is that it helps us, by means of its spiritual 
standard of perfection, to regard wealth as but machinery, 
and not only to say as a matter of words that we regard 
wealth as but machinery, but really to perceive and feel 
that itis so. If it were not for this purging effect wrought 
upon our minds by culture, the whole world, the future 
as well as the present, would inevitably belong to the 
Philistines. The people who believe most that our great- 
ness and welfare are proved by our being very rich, and 
who most give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich, 
are just the very people whom we call Philistines. Cul- 
ture says: “Consider these people, then, their way of 
life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their 
voice; look at them attentively; observe the literature 
they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words 
which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which 
make the furniture of their minds; would any amount 
of wealth be worth having with the condition that one 
was to become just like these people by having it?” 
And thus culture begets a dissatisfaction which is of the 
highest possible value in stemming the common tide of 
men’s thoughts in a wealthy and industrial community, 
and which saves the future, as one may hope, from being 
vulgarised, even if it cannot save the present. 
Population, again, and bodily health and vigour, are 
things which are nowhere treated in such an unintelligent, 
misleading, exaggerated way as in England. Both are 
really machinery; yet how many people all around us do 


Sweetness and Light 49 


we see rest in them and fail to look beyond them! Why, 
one has heard people, fresh from reading certain articles 
of the Times on the Registrar-General’s returns of mar- 
riages and births in this country, who would talk of our 
large English families in quite a solemn strain, as if they 
had something in itself beautiful, elevating, and meri- 
torious in them; as if the British Philistine would have 
only to present himself before the Great Judge with his 
twelve children, in order to be received among the sheep 
as a matter of right! 

But bodily health and vigour, it may be said, are not 
to be classed with wealth and population as mere ma- 
chinery; they have a more real and essential value. True; 
but only as they are more intimately connected with a 
perfect spiritual condition than wealth or population are. 
The moment we disjoin them from the idea of a perfect 
spiritual condition, and pursue them, as we do pursue 
them, for their own sake and as ends in themselves, our 
worship of them becomes as mere worship of machinery, 
as our worship of wealth or population, and as unintel- 
ligent and vulgarising a worship as that is. Every one 
with anything like an adequate idea of human perfection 
has distinctly marked this subordination to higher and 
spiritual ends of the cultivation of bodily vigour and 
activity. “Bodily exercise profiteth little; but godliness 
is profitable unto all things,’ says the author of the 
Epistle to Timothy. And the utilitarian Franklin says 
just as explicitly :—“ Eat and drink such an exact quantity 
as suits the constitution of thy body, in reference to the 
services of the mind.” But the point of view of culture, 
keeping the mark of human perfection simply and broadly 
in view, and not assigning to this perfection, as religion or 
utilitarianism assigns to it, a special and limited character, 
this point of view, I say, of culture is best given by these 


50 Culture and Anarchy 


words of Epictetus:—“It is a sigh of ddvta,” says he,— 
that is, of a nature not finely tempered,—“‘to give your- 
selves up to things which relate to the body; to make, 
for instance, a great fuss about exercise, a great fuss 
about eating, a great fuss about drinking, a great fuss 
about walking, a great fuss about riding. All these things 
ought to be done merely by the way: the formation of the 
spirit and character must be our real concern.” ‘This is 
admirable; and, indeed, the Greek word e’dvia, a finely 
tempered nature, gives exactly the notion of perfection as: 
culture brings us to conceive it: a harmonious perfection, 
a perfection in which the characters of beauty and intel- 
ligence are both present, which unites “the two noblest 
of things,’—as Swift, who of one of the two, at any rate, 
had himself all too little, most happily calls them in his 
Battle of the Books,—“the two noblest of things, sweetness 
and light.” The eipuns is the man who tends towards 
sweetness and light; the adujs, on the other hand, 1s our 
Philistine. The immense spiritual significance of the 
Greeks is due to their having been inspired with this 
central and happy idea of the essential character of 
human perfection; and Mr. Bright’s misconception of 
culture, as a smattering of Greek and Latin, comes itself, 
after all, from this wonderful significance of the Greeks 
having affected the very machinery of our education, and 
is in itself a kind of homage to it. 

In thus making sweetness and light to be characters 
of perfection, culture is of like spirit with poetry, follows 
one law with poetry. Far more than on our freedom, our 
population, and our industrialism, many amongst us rely 
upon our religious organisations to save us. I have called 
religion a yet more important manifestation of human 
nature than poetry, because it has worked on a broader 
scale for perfection, and with greater masses of men. But 


Sweetness and Light 51 


the idea of beauty and of a human nature perfect_on all 
its sides, which is the dominant idea of poetry, is a true 
and invaluable idea, though it has not yet had the success 
that the idea of conquering the obvious faults of our animal- 
ity, and of a human nature perfect on the moral side,— 
which is the dominant idea of religion,—has been enabled 
to have; and it is destined, adding to itself the religious 
idéa of a devout energy, to transform and govern the other. 

The best art and poetry of the Greeks, in which religion 
and poetry are one, in which the idea of beauty and of a 
human nature perfect on all sides adds to itself a religious 
and devout energy, and works in the strength of that, is 
on this account of such surpassing interest and instructive- 
ness for us, though it was,—as, having regard to the human 
race in general, and, indeed, having regard to the Greeks - 
themselves, we must own,—a premature attempt, an 
attempt which for success needed the moral and reli- 
gious fibre in humanity to be more braced and déveloped 
than it had yet been. But Greece did not err in having 
the idea of beauty, harmony, and complete human perfec- 
tion, so present and paramount. It is impossible to have 
this idea too present and paramount; only, the moral 
fibre must be braced too. And we, because we have braced 
the moral fibre, are not on that account in the right way, 
if at the same time the idea of beauty, harmony, and 
complete human perfection, is wanting or misapprehended 
amongst us; and evidently it 1s wanting or misapprehended 
at present. And when we rely as we do on our religious 
organisations, which in themselves do not and cannot 
give us this idea, and think we have done enough if we 
make them spread and prevail, then, I say, we fall into 
our common fault of overvaluing machinery. 

Nothing is more common than for people to confound 
the inward peace and satisfaction which follows the sub- 

UNIVERSITY OF* 


UL O re ILLINOIS LIBRARY 
a OTs w fat * / 


52 Culture and Anarchy 


duing of the obvious faults of our animality with what I 
may call absolute inward peace and satisfaction,—the 
peace and satisfaction which are reached as we draw near 
to complete spiritual perfection, and not merely to moral 
perfection, or rather to relative moral perfection. No 
people in the world have done more and struggled more to 
attain this relative moral perfection than our English race 
has. For no people in the world has the command to 
resist the devil, to overcome the wicked one, in the nearest 
and most obvious sense of those words, had such a pressing 
force and reality. And we have had our reward, not only 
in the great worldly prosperity which our obedience to 
this command has brought us, but also, and far more, 
in great inward peace and satisfaction. But to me few 
things are more pathetic than to see people, on the strength 
of the inward peace and satisfaction which their rudi- 
mentary efforts towards perfection have brought them, 
employ, concerning their incomplete perfection and the 
religious organisations within which they have found it, 
language which properly applies only to complete perfec- 
tion, and is a far-off echo of the human soul’s prophecy of 
it. Religion itself, I need hardly say, supplies them in 
abundance with this grand language. And very freely 
do they use it; yet it is really the severest possible criticism 
of such an incomplete perfection as alone we have yet 
reached through our religious organisations. 

( The impulse of the English race towards moral develop- 
ment and self-conquest has nowhere so powerfully mani- 
fested itself as in Puritanism. Nowhere has Puritanism 
found so adequate an expression as in the religious organ- 
isation of the Independents. The modern Independents 
have a newspaper, the Nonconformist, written with great 
sincerity and ability. The motto, the standard, the pro- 
fession of faith which this organ of theirs carries aloft, is: 


Sweetness and Light 53 


*“The Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the 
Protestant religion.” ‘There is sweetness and light, and 
an ideal of complete harmonious human perfection! One 
need not go toculture and poetry to find language to judge 
it. Religion, with its instinct for perfection, supplies 
language to judge it, language, too, which is in our mouths 
every day. ‘Finally, be of one mind, united in feeling,” 
says St. Peter. There is an ideal which judges the Puritan 
ideal: “The Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism 
of the Protestant religion!’’ And religious organisations 
like this are what people believe m, rest in, would give 
their lives for! Such, I say, 1s the wonderful virtue of even 
the beginnings of perfection, of having conquered even the 
plain faults of our-animality, that the religious organisa- 
tion which has helped us to do it can seem to us something 
precious, salutary, and to be propagated, even when it 
wears such a brand of imperfection on its forehead as this. 
And mew have got such a habit of giving to the language 
ef religien a special application, of making it a mere 
jargon, that for the condemnation which religion itself 
passes on the shortcomings of their religious organisa- 
tions they have no ear; they are sure to cheat themselves 
and to explain this condemnation away. They can only 
be reached by the criticism which culture, like poetry, 
spéaking a language not to be sophisticated, and resolutely 
testing these organisations by the ideal of a human perfec- 
tion complete on all sides, applies to them. 

But men of culture and poetry, it will be said, are 
again and again failing, and failing conspicuously, in 
the necessary hrst stage to a harmonious perfection, in 
the subduing of the great obvious faults of our animality, 
_which it is the glory of these religious organisations to 
have helped us to subdue. True, they do often so fail. 
They have often been without the virtues as well as the 


54 Culture and Anarchy 


faults of the Puritan; it has been one of their dangers 
that they so felt the Puritan’s faults that they too much 
neglected the practice of his virtues. I will not, however, 
exculpate them at the Puritan’s expense. They have 
often failed in morality, and morality is indispensable. 
And they have been punished for their failure, as the 
Puritan has been rewarded for his performance. They 
have been punished wherein they erred; but their ideal 
of beauty, of sweetness and light, and a human nature 
complete on all its sides, remains the true ideal of perfec- 
tion still; just as the Puritan’s ideal of perfection remains 
narrow and inadequate, although for what he did well he 
has been richly rewarded. Notwithstanding the mighty 
results of the Pilgrim Fathers’ voyage, they and their 
standard of perfection are rightly judged when we figure 
to ourselves Shakspeare or Virgil,—souls in whom sweet- 
ness and light, and all that in human nature is most 
humane, were eminent,—accompanying them on their 
voyage, and think what intolerable company Shakspeare 
and Virgil would have found them! In the same way let 
us judge the religious organisations which we see all 
around us. Do not let us deny the good and the happiness 
which they have accomplished; but do not let us fail to 
see clearly that their idea of human perfection is narrow 
and inadequate, and that the Dissidence of Dissent and 
the Protestantism of the Protestant religion will never 
bring humanity to its true goal. As I said with regard 
to wealth: Let us look at the life of those who live in and 
for it,—so I say with regard to the religious organisations. 
Look at the life imaged in such a newspaper as the Non- 
conformist,—a life of jealousy of the Establishment, 
disputes, tea-meetings, openings of chapels, sermons; 
and then think of it as an ideal of a human life com- 


Sweetness and Light 55 


pleting itself on all sides, and aspiring with all its organs 
after sweetness, light, and perfection! 

Another newspaper, representing, like the Noncon- 
formist, one of the religious organisations of this country, 
was a short time ago giving an account of the crowd at 
Epsom on the Derby day, and of all the vice and hideous- 
ness which was to be seen in that crowd; and then the 
writer turned suddenly round upon Professor Huxley, and 
asked him how he proposed to cure all this vice and 
hideousness without religion. I confess I felt disposed 
to ask the asker this question: and how do you propose to 
cure it with such a religion as yours? How 1s the ideal of 
a life so unlovely, so unattractive, so incomplete, so 
narrow, so far removed from a true and satisfying ideal 
of human perfection, as is the life of your religious organisa- 
tion as you yourself reflect it, to conquer and transform 
all this vice and hideousness? Indeed, the strongest 
plea for the study of perfection as pursued by culture, the 
clearest proof of the actual inadequacy of the idea of 
perfection held by the religious organisations,—expressing, 
as I have said, the most widespread effort which the human 
race has yet made after perfection,—is to be found in the 
state of our life and society with these in possession of it, 
and having been in possession of it I know not how many 
hundred years. We are all of us included in some religious 
organisation or other; we all call ourselves, in the sublime 
and aspiring language of religion which I have before 
noticed, children of God. Children of God;—it 1s an im- 
mense pretension!—and how are we to justify it? By 
the works which we do, and the words which we speak. 
And the work which we collective children of God do, our 
grand centre of life, our city which we have builded for us 
to dwell in, is London! London, with its unutterable 
external hideousnéss,. and with its internal canker of 


56 | Culture and Anarchy 


publicé egestas, privatim opulentia,—to use the words 
which Sallust puts into Cato’s mouth about Rome,— 
unequalled in the world! The word, again, which we 
children of God speak, the voice which most hits our 
collective thought, the newspaper with the largest circula- 
tion in Eneland, nay, with the largest circulation in the 
whole world, is the Daily Telegraph! J say that when our 
religious organisations,—which I admit to express the 
most considerable effort after perfection that our race has 
yet made,—land us in no better result than this, it is high 
time to examine carefully their idea of perfection, to see 
whether it does not leave out of account sides and forces of 
human nature which we might turn to great use; whether 
it would not be more operative if it were more complete. 
And I say that the English reliance on our religious organ- 
isations and on their ideas of human perfection just as they 
stand, is like our reliance on freedom, on muscular Chris- 
tianity, on population, on coal, on wealth,—mere belief in 
machinery, and unfruitful; and that it is wholesomely 
counteracted by culture, bent on seeing things as they 
are, and on drawing the human race onwards to a more 
complete, a harmonious perfection. 

Culture, however, shows its single-minded love of 
perfection, its desire simply to make reason and the will 
of God prevail, its freedom from fanaticism, by its atti- 
tude towards all this machinery, even while it insists 
that itis machinery. Fanatics, seeing the mischief men 
do themselves by their blind belief in some machinery 
or: other,—whether it is wealth and industrialism, or 
whether it is the cultivation of bedily strength and activ- 
ity, or whether it is a political organisation,—or whether 
it is a religious organisation,—oppose with might and 
main the tendency to this or that political and religious 
organisation, or to games and athletic exercises, or to 


Sweetness and Light Si 


wealth and industrialism, and try violently to stop it. 
But the flexibility which sweetness and light give, and 
which is one of the rewards of culture pursued in good 
faith, enables a man to see that a tendency may be neces- 
sary, and even, as a preparation for something in the 
future, salutary, and yet that the generations or individuals 
who obey this tendency are sacrificed to it, that they fall 
short of the hope of perfection by following it; and that 
its mischiefs are to be criticised, lest it should take too 
firm a hold and last after it has served its purpose. 

_ Mr. Gladstone well pointed out, in a speech at Paris,— 
and others have pointed out the same thing,—how nec- 
essary is the present great movement towards wealth 
and industrialism, in order to lay broad foundations of 
material well-being for the society of the future. The 
worst of these justifications is, that they are generally 
addressed to the very people engaged, body and soul, in 
the movement in question; at all events, that they are 
always seized with the greatest avidity by these people, 
and taken by them as quite justifying their life; and that 
thus they tend to harden them in their sins. Now, culture 
admits the necessity of the movement towards fortune- 
making and exaggerated industrialism, readily allows that 
the future may derive benefit from it; but insists, at the 
same time, that the passing generations of industrialists,— 
forming, for the most part, the stout main body of Phi- 
listinism,—are sacrificed to it. In the same way, the result 
of all the games and sports which occupy the. passing 
generation of boys and young men may be the establish- 
ment of a better and sounder physical type for the future 
to work with. Culture does not set itself against the games 
and sports; it congratulates the future, and hopes it will 
make a good use of its improved physical basis; but it 
points out that our passing generation of boys and young 


/ 


58 Culture and Anarchy 


men is, meantime, sacrificed. Puritanism was perhaps 
necessary to develop the moral fibre of the English race, 
Nonconformity to break the yoke of ecclesiastical dom- 
ination over men’s minds and to prepare the way for 
freedom of thought in the distant future; still, culture 
points out that the harmonious perfection of generations 
of Puritans and Nonconformists have been, in consequence, 
sacrificed. Freedom of speech may be necessary for the 
society of the future, but the young lions of the Daily 
Telegraph in the meanwhile are sacrificed. A voice for 
every man in his country’s government may be necessary 
for the society of the future, but meanwhile Mr. Beales 
and Mr. Bradlaugh are sacrificed. 
_ Oxford, the Oxford of the past, has many faults; and 
“she has heavily paid for them in defeat, in isolation, in 
want of hold upon the modern world. Yet we in Oxford, 
brought up amidst the beauty and sweetness of that beauti- 
ful place, have not failed to seize one truth,—the truth 
that beauty and sweetness are essential characters of a 
complete human perfection. When I insist on this, I am 
all in the faith and tradition of Oxford. I say boldly that 
this our sentiment for beauty and sweetness, our sentiment 
against hideousness and rawness, has been at the bottom 
of our attachment to so many beaten causes, of our oppo- 
sition to so many triumphant movements. And the 
sentiment is true, and has never been wholly defeated, 
and has shown its power even in its defeat. We have not 
won our political battles, we have not carried our main 
points, we have not stopped our adversaries’ advance, 
we have not marched victoriously with the modern world; 
but we have told silently upon the mind of the country,’ 
we have prepared currents of feeling which sap our adver- 
saries’ position when it seems gained, we have kept up 
our own communications with the future. Look at the 


Sweetness and Light 59 


course of the great movement which shook Oxford to its 
centre some thirty years ago! It was directed, as any one 
who reads Dr. Newman’s Apology may see, against what 
in one word may be called “Liberalism.” Liberalism 
prevailed; it was the appointed force to do the work of 
the hour; it was necessary, it was inevitable that it should 
prevail. The Oxford movement was broken, it failed; 
our wrecks are scattered on every shore:— 
Quz regio in terris nostri non plena laboris? 

But what was it, this liberalism, as Dr. Newman saw it, 
and as it really broke the Oxford movement? It was the 
great middle-class liberalism, which had for the cardinal 
points of its belief the Reform Bill of 1832, and local 
self-government, in politics; in the social sphere, free-trade, 
unrestricted competition, and the making of large indus- 
trial fortunes; in the religious sphere, the Dissidence of 
Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion. 
I do not say that other and more intelligent forces than 
_ this were not opposed to the Oxford movement: but this 
was the force which really beat it; this was the force which 
Dr. Newman felt himself fighting with; this was the force 
which till only the other day seemed to be the paramount 
force in this country, and to be in possession of the future; 
this was the force whose achievements fill Mr. Lowe with 
such inexpressible admiration, and whose rule he was so 
horror-struck to see threatened. And where is this great 
force of Philistinism now? It is thrust into the second 
rank, it is become a power of yesterday, it has lost the 
future. &- new power has suddenly appeared, a power 
which it is impossible yet to judge fully, but which is 
certainly a wholly different force from middle-class liberal- 
ism; different in its cardinal points of belief, different in its 
tendencies in every sphere. It loves and admires neither 
the legislation of middle-class Parliaments, nor the local 


/ 


- 


60 Culture and Anarchy 


self-government of middle-class vestries, nor the unre- 
stricted competition of middle-class industrialists, nor the 
dissidence of middle-class Dissent and the Protestantism 
of middle-class Pretestant religion. [I am not now praising 
this new force, or saying that its own ideals are better; 
all I say is, that they are wholly different. And who will 
estimate how much the currents of feeling created by 
Dr. Newman’s movements, the keen desire for beauty 
and sweetness which it nourished, the deep aversion it 
manifested to the hardness and vulgarity of middle-class 
liberalism, the strong light it turned on the hideous and 
grotesque illusions of middle-class Protestantism,—who 
will estimate how much all these contributed to swell the 
tide of secret dissatisfaction which has mined the ground 
under self-confident liberalism of the last thirty years, 
and has prepared the way for its sudden collapse and 
supersession? It is in this manner that the sentiment of 
Oxford for beauty and sweetness conquers, and in this 
manner long may it continue to conquer! 

In this manner it works to the same end as culture, 
and there is plenty of work for it yet to do. I have said 
that the new and more democratic force which is now 
superseding our old middle-class liberalism cannot yet 
be rightly judged. It has its main tendencies still to form. 
We hear promises of its giving us administrative reform, 
law reform, reform of education, and I know not what; 
but those promises come rather from its advocates, wish- 
ing to make a good plea for it and to justify it for super- 
seding middle-class liberalism, than from clear tendencies 
which it has itself yet developed. But meanwhile it has 
plenty of well-intentioned friends against whom culture 
may with advantage continue to uphold steadily its 


_ ideal of human perfection; that this is an inward spiritual 


activity, having for its characters increased sweetness, 


Sweetness and Light 61 


increased light, increased life, increased sympathy. Mr. 
Bright, whe has a foot in both worlds, the world of middle- 
class liberalism and the world of democracy, but who 
brings most of his ideas from the world of middle-class 
liberalism in which he was bred, always inclines to incul- 
cate that faith in machinery to which, as we have seen, 
Englishmen are so prone, and which has been the bane of 
middle-class liberalism. He complains with a sorrowful 
indignation of people who “appear to have no proper 
estimate of the value of the franchise;” he leads his 
disciples to believe,t-what the Englishman is always too 
ready to believe,—that the having a vote, like the having 
a large family, or a large business, or large muscles, has in 
itself some edifying and perfecting effect upon human 
nature. Or else he cries out to the democracy,—‘‘the 
men,” as he calls them, “‘upon whose shoulders the great- 
ness of England rests,’”’—he cries out to them: “‘See what 
you have done! I look over this country and see the 
cities you have built, the railroads you have made, the 
manufactures you have produced, the cargoes which 
freight the ships of the greatest mercantile navy the 
world has ever seen! I see that you have converted by 
your labours what was once a wilderness, these islands, 
into a fruitful garden; I know that you have created this 
wealth, and are a nation whose name is a word of power 
throughout all the world.’”? Why, this is just the very 
style of laudation with which Mr. Roebuck, or Mr. Lowe 
debauches the minds- of the middle classes, and makes 
such Philistines of them. It is the same fashion of teaching 
a man to value himself not on what he 7s, not on his 
progress in sweetness and light, but on the number of the 
railroads he has constructed, or the bigness of the taber- 
nacle he has built. Only the middle classes are told they 
have done it all with their energy, self-reliance, and capital, 


62 Culture and Anarchy 


and the democracy are told they have done it all with 
their hands and sinews. But teaching the democracy to 
put its trust in achievements of this kind is merely training 
them to be Philistines to take the place of the Philistines 
whom they are superseding; and they too, like the middle 
class, will be encouraged to sit down at the banquet of 
the future without having on a wedding garment, and 
nothing excellent can then come from them. Those who 
know their besetting faults, those who have watched them 
and listened to them, or those who will read the instructive 
account recently given of them by one of themselves, the 
Journeyman Engineer, will agree that the idea which 
culture sets before us of perfection,—an increased spiritual 
activity, having for its characters increased sweetness, 
increased light, increased life, increased sympathy,—is an 
idea which the new democraey needs far more than the 
idea of the blessedness of the franchise, or the wonderful- 
ness of its own industrial performances. 

Other well-meaning friends of this new power are for 
leading it, not in the old ruts of middle-class Philistinism, 
but in ways which are naturally alluring to the feet of 
democracy, though in this country they are novel and 
untried ways. I may call them the ways of Jacobinism. 
Violent indignation with the past, abstract systems of 
renovation applied wholesale, a new doctrine drawn up. 
in black and white for elaborating down to the very small- 
est details a rational society for the future,—these are 
the ways of Jacobinism. Mr. Frederic Harrison and other 
disciples of Comte,—one of them, Mr. Congreve, is an 
old friend of mine, and I am glad to have an opportunity 
of publicly expressing: my respect for his talents and 
character,—are among the friends of democracy who are 
for leading it in paths of this kind. Mr. Frederic Harrison 
is very hostile to culture, and from a natural enough 


Sweetness and Light 63 


motive; for culture is the eternal opponent of the two 
things which are the signal marks of Jacobinism,—its 
fierceness, and its addiction to an abstract system. Culture 
is always assigning to system-makers and systems a 
smaller share in the bent of human destiny than their 
friends like. A current in people’s minds sets towards 
new ideas; people are dissatisfied with their old narrow 
stock of Philistine ideas, Anglo-Saxon ideas, or any other; 
and some man, some Bentham or Comte, who has the 
real merit of having early and strongly felt and helped 
the new current, but who brings plenty of narrowness 
and mistakes of his own into his feeling and help of it, is 
credited with being the author of the -whole current, the 
fit person to be entrusted with its regulation and to guide 
the human race. 

The excellent German historian of the mythology of 
Rome, Preller, relating the introduction at Rome under 
the Tarquins of the worship of Apollo, the god of light, 
healing, and reconciliation, will have us observe that it 
was not so much the Tarquins who brought to Rome the 
new worship of Apollo, as a current in the mind of the 
Roman people which set powerfully at that time towards 
a new worship of this kind, and away from the old run 
of Latin and Sabine religious ideas. In a similar way, 
culture directs our attention to the natural current there 
is in human affairs, and to its continual working, and will 
not let us rivet our faith upon any one man and his doings. 
It makes us see not only his good side, but also how much 
in him was of necessity limited and transient; nay, it even 
feels a pleasure, a sense of an increased freedom and of 
an ampler future, in so doing. 

I remember, when I was under the influence of a mind 
to which I feel the greatest obligations, the mind of a man 
who was the very incarnation of sanity and clear sense, 


64 Culture and Anarchy 


a man the most considerable, it seems to me, whom 
America has yet produced,—Benjamin Franklin,—I 
remember the relief with which, after long feeling the 
sway of Franklin’s imperturbable common-sense, I came 
upon a project of his for a new version of the Book of Job, 
to replace the old version, the style of which, says Franklin, 
has become obsolete, and thence less agreeable. “‘I give,” 
he continues, “‘a few verses, which may serve as a sample 
of the kind of version I would recommend.” We all 
recollect the famous verse in our translation: ‘Then 
Satan answered the Lord and said: ‘Doth Job fear God for 
nought?’”’ Franklin makes this: “Does your Majesty 
imagine that Job’s good conduct is the effect of mere 
personal attachment and affection?” I well remember 
how, when first I read that, I-drew a deep breath of relief, 
and said to myself: “After all, there is a stretch of human- 
ity beyond Franklin’s victorious good sense!” So, after 
hearing Bentham cried loudly up as the renovator of 
modern society, and Bentham’s mind and ideas proposed 
as the rulers of our future, [ open the Deontology. ‘There 
{ read: “While Xenophon was writing his history and 
Euclid teaching geometry, Socrates and Plato were talking 
nonsense under pretence of talking wisdom and morality. 
This morality of theirs consisted in words; this wisdom of 
theirs was the denial of matters known to every man’s 
experience.” From the moment of reading that, I am 
delivered from the bondage of Bentham! the fanaticism 
of his adherents can touch me no longer. I feel the in- 
adequacy of his mind and ideas for supplying the rule of 
human society, for perfection. | | 
Culture tends always thus to deal with the men of a 
system, of disciples, of a school; with men like Comte, 
or the late Mr. Buckle, or Mr. Mill. However much it 
may find to admire in these personages, or in some of them, 


: Sweetness and Light 65 


it nevertheless remembers the text: “Be not ye called 
Rabbi!” and it soon passes on from any Rabbi. But 
Jacobinism loves a Rabbi; it does not want to pass on 
from its Rabbi in pursuit of a future and still unreached 
perfection; it wants its Rabbi and his ideas to stand for 
perfection, that they may with the more authority recast 
the world; and for Jacobinism, therefore, culture,—eter- 
nally passing onwards and seeking,—is an impertinence 
and an offence. But culture, just because it resists this 
tendency of Jacobinism to impose on us a man with 
limitations and errors of his own along with the true ideas 
of which he is the organ, really does the world and Jacobin- 
ism itself a service. 

So, too, Jacobinism, in its fierce hatred of the past 
and of those whom it makes liable for the sins of the past, 
cannot away with the inexhaustible indulgence proper to 
culture, the consideration of circumstances, the severe 
judgment of actions joined to the merciful judgment of 
persons. ‘“The man of culture is in politics,” cries Mr. 
Frederic Harrison, “one of the poorest mortals alive!” 
Mr. Frederic Harrison wants to be doing business, and 
he complains that the man of culture stops him with a 
“turn for small fault-finding, love of selfish ease, and 
indecision in action.” Of what use is culture, he asks, 
except for “‘a critic of new books or a professor of belles- 
lettres??? Why, it is of. use because, in presence of the 
fierce exasperation which breathes, or rather, I may say, 
hisses through the whole production in which Mr. Frederic 
Harrison asks that question, it reminds us that the per- 
fection of human nature is sweetness and light. It is of 
use because, like religion,—that other effort after perfec- 

»tion,—it testifies that, where bitter envying and strife 
are, there is confusion and every evil work. 

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweet 


66 Culture and Anarchy 


ness and light. He who works for sweetness and light, 
works to make reason and the will of God prevail. He 
who works for machinery, he who works for hatred, works 
only for confusion. Culture looks beyond machinery, 
culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the 
passion for sweetness and light. It has one even yet 
greater!—the passion for making them prevail. It is not 
satisfied till we all come to a perfect man;' it knows that 
the sweetness and light of the few must be imperfect until 
the raw and unkindled masses of humanity are touched 
with sweetness and light. If I have not shrunk from say- 
ing that we must work for sweetness and light, so neither 
have I shrunk from saying that we must have a broad 
basis, must have sweetness and light for as many as pos- 
sible. Again and again I have insisted how those are the 
happy moments of humanity, how those are the marking 
epochs of a people’s life, how those are the flowering times 
for literature and art and all the creative power of genius, 
when there is a national glow of life and thought, when the - 
whole of society is in the fullest measure permeated by 
thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive. Only 
it must be real thought and real beauty; real sweetness 
and real light. Plenty of people will try to give the masses, 
as they call them, an intellectual food prepared and 
adapted in the way they think proper for the actual condi- 
tion of the masses. The ordinary popular literature is an 
example of this way of working on the masses. Plenty 
of people will try to indoctrinate the masses with the set 
of ideas and judgments constituting the creed of their. 
own profession or party. Our religious and _ political 
organizations give an example of this way of working on 
the masses. I condemn neither way; but culture works 
differently. It does not try to teach down to the level 
of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or 


Sweetness and Light 67 


that sect of its own, with ready-made judgments and 
watchwords. It seeks to do away with classes; to make 
the best that has been thought and known in the world 
current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere 
of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it 
uses them itself, freely,—nourished, and not bound by 
them. 

This is the social idea; and the men of culture are the 
true apostles of equality. The great men of culture are 
those who have had a passion for diffusing, for making 
prevail, for carrying from one end of society to the other, 
the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time; who have 
laboured to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, 
‘uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to 
humanise it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the 
cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the dest knowl- 
edge and thought of the time, and a true source, therefore, 
of sweetness and light. Such a man was Abelard in the 
Middle Ages, in spite of all his imperfections; and thence 
the boundless emotion and enthusiasm which Abelard 
excited. Such were Lessing and Herder in Germany, at 
the end of the last century; and their services to Germany 
were in this way inestimably precious. Generations will 
pass, and literary monuments will accumulate, and works 
far more perfect than the works of Lessing and Herder will 
be produced in Germany; and yet the names of these two 
men will fill a German with a reverence and enthusiasm 
such as the names of the most gifted masters will hardly 
awaken. And why? Because they humanised knowledge; 
because they broadened the basis of life and intelligence; 
because they worked powerfully to diffuse sweetness and 
light, to make reason and the will of God prevail. With 
Saint Augustine they said: “‘Let us not leave thee alone 
to make in the secret of thy knowledge, as thou didst 


68 Culture and Anarchy 


before the creation of the firmament, the division of light 
from darkness; let the children of thy spirit, placed in their 
firmament, make their light shine upon the earth, mark 
the division of night and day, and announce the revolution 
of the times; for the old order is passed, and the new arises; 
the night is spent, the day is come forth; and thou shalt 
crown the year with thy blessing, when thou shalt send 
forth labourers into thy harvest sown by other hands than 
theirs; when thou shalt send forth new labourers to new 
seed-times, whereof the harvest shall be not yet.” 


bee CHAPTER II 
DOING AS ONE LIKES 


I wave been trying to show that culture is, or ought to 
be, the study and pursuit of perfection; and that of per- 
fection as pursued by culture, beauty and intelligence, 
or, in other words, sweetness and light, are the main 
characters. But hitherto I have been insisting chiefly 
on beauty, or sweetness, as a character of perfection. 
To complete rightly my design, it evidently remains to 
speak also of intelligence, or light, as a character of per- 
fection. 

First, however, I ought perhaps to notice that, both 
here and on the other side of the Atlantic, all sorts of 
objections are raised against the “‘religion of culture,” 
as the objectors mockingly call it, which I am supposed 
to be promulgating. It is said to be a religion proposing 
parmaceti, or some scented salve or other, as a cure for 
human miseries; a religion breathing a spirit of cultivated 
inaction, making its believer refuse to lend a hand at 
uprooting the definite evils on all sides of us, and filling 
him with antipathy against the reforms and reformers 
which try to extirpate them. In general, it is summed up 
as being not practical, or,—as some critics familiarly 
put it,—all moonshine. That Alcibiades, the editor 
of the Morning Star, taunts me, as its promulgator, with 
living out of the world and knowing nothing of life and 
men. ‘That great austere toiler, the editor of the Daily 
Telegraph, upbraids me,—but kindly, and more in sorrow 
than in anger,—for trifling with zsthetics and poetical 
fancies, while he himself, in that arsenal of his in Fleet 
Street, is bearing the burden and heat of the day. An 

69 


70 Culture and Anarchy 


intellizent American newspaper, the Nation, says that 
it is very easy to sit in one’s study and find fault with the 
course of modern society, but the thing is to propose 
practical improvements for it. While, finally, Mr. Frederic 
Harrison, in a very good-tempered and witty satire, which 
makes me quite understand his having apparently achieved 
such a conquest of my young Prussian friend, Arminius, 
at last gets moved to an almost stern moral impatience, 
to behold, ashe says, ‘‘Death, sin, cruelty stalk among 
us, filling their maws with innocence and youth,” and me, 
in the midst of the general tribulation, handing out my 
pouncet-box. 

It 1s impossible that all these remonstrances and reproofs 
should not affect me, and [ shall try my very best, in 
completing my design and in speaking of light as one 
of the characters of perfection, and of culture as giving 
us light, to profit by the objections I have heard and read, 
and to drive at practice as much as [ can, by showing the 
communications and passages into practical life from the 
doctrine which I am inculcating. 

It is said that a man with my theories of sweetness 
and light is full of antipathy against the rougher or coarser 
movements going on around him, that he will not lend a 
hand to the humble operation of uprooting evil by their 
means, and that therefore the believers in action grow 
impatient with him. But what if rough and coarse action, 
ill-calculated action, action with insufficient light, is, and 
has for a long time béén, our bane?-"What if our urgent 
want now is, not to act at any price, but rather to lay in 
a stock of light for our difficulties? In that case, to refuse 
to lend’ a hand to the rougher and coarser movements 
going on round us, to make the primary need, both for 
oneself and others, to consist in enlightening ourselves 
and qualifying ourselves to act less at random, is surely 


Doing as One Likes 71 


the best and in real truth the most practical line our 
endeavours can také.~~So that if I can show what my 
opponents calf rough or coarse action, but what I would 
rather call random and ill-regulated action,—action with 
“insufficient light, action purstted because we like to be 
doing something and doing it as we please, and do not 
like the trouble of thinking and the severe constraint of 
any kind of rule,—if I can show this to be, at the present 
moment, a practical mischief and dangerous to us, then 
I have found a practical use for light in correcting this 
state of things, and have only to exemplify how, in cases 
which fall under everybody’s observation, it may deal 
with it: 

When“T began to speak of culture, I insisted on our 
bondage to machinery, on our proneness to value machin- 
ery as an end in itself, without looking beyond it to the 
end for which alone, in truth, it is valuable. Freedom, I 
said, was one of those things which we thus worshipped 
in itself, without enough regarding the ends for which 
freedom is to be desired. In our common notions and talk 
about freedom, we eminently show our idolatry of ma- 
chinery. Our prevalent notion is,—and I quoted a number 
of instances to prove it,—that it is a most happy.and.im-.. 
portant thing for a man merely to be able to do as he likes, 
On what he is to do when he is thus free to do as he likes, 
we do not lay so much stress. Our familiar praise of the 
British Constitution under which we live, is that it is a 
system of checks,—a system which stops and paralyses 
any power in interfering with the free action of individuals. 
To this effect Mr. Bright, who loves to walk in the old 
ways of the Constitution, said forcibly in one of his great 
speeches, what many other people are every day saying 
{less forcibly, that the central idea of English life and 


\\ Beguccs 3 is the assertion of personal liberty. Evidently this 


72 Culture and Anarchy 


is so; but evidently, also, as feudalism, which with its 
ideas and habits of subordination was for many centuries 
silently behind the British Constitution, dies out, and we 
are left with nothing but our system of checks, and our 
_ notion of its being the great right and happiness of an 
“Englishman to do as far as possible what he likes, we are 


i | in danger of drifting towards anarchy. We have not the 


notion, so familiar on the Continent and to antiquity, of 
the State,—the nation in its collective and corporate char- 
acter; entrusted with stringent powers for the general 
advantage, and controlling individual wills in the name 
of an interest wider than that of individuals. We say, 
what is very true, that this notion is often made instru- 
mental to tyranny; we say that a State is in reality made 
up of the individuals who compose it, and that every 
individual is the best judge of his own interests. Our 
leading class is an aristocracy, and no aristocracy likes 
the notion of a State-authority greater than itself, with 
a stringent administrative machinery superseding the 
decorative inutilities of lord-lieutenancy, deputy-lieu- 
tenancy, and the posse comitatus, which are all in its own 
hands. Our middle class, the great representative of 
trade and Dissent, with its maxims of every man for him-' 
self in business, every man for himself in religion, dreads a | 
powerful administration which might somehow interfere | 
with it; and besides, it has its own decorative inutilities | 
of vestrymanship and guardianship, which are to this 
class what lord-lieutenancy and the county magistracy 
are to the aristocratic class, and a stringent administration 
might either take these functions out of its hands, or 
prevent its exercising them in its own comfortable, inde- 
pendent manner, as at present. 

Then as to our working class. This class, pressed con- 
stantly by the hard daily compulsion of material wants, 


Doing as One Likes 73 


is naturally the very centre and stronghold of our national 
idea, that it is man’s ideal right and felicity to do as he 
likes. I think I have somewhere related how M. Michelet 
said to me of the people of France, that it was “a nation 
of barbarians civilised by the conscription.” He meant 
that through their military service the idea of public 
duty and of discipline was brought to the mind of these 
masses, in other respects so raw and uncultivated. Our 
masses are quite as raw and uncultivated as the French; 
and so far from their having the idea of public duty and 
‘of discipline, superior to the individual’s self-will, brought 
\to their mind by a universal obligation of military ser- 
eu such as that of the conscription,—so far from their 
having this, the very idea of a conscription is so at vari- 
ance with our English notion of the prime right and blessed- 
ness of doing as one likes, that I remember the manager 
of the Clay Cross works in Derbyshire told me during 
the Crimean war, when our want of soldiers was much 
felt and some people were talking of a conscription, that 
sooner than submit to a conscription the population of that 
district would flee to the mines, and lead a sort of Robin 
Hood life under ground. | 
For a long time, as I have said, the strong feudal habits 
of subordination and deference continued to tell upon the 
-working class. The modern spirit has now almost en- 
\tirely dissolved those habits, and the anarchical tendency 
\of our worship of freedom in and for itself, of our super- 
stitious faith, as I say, in machinery, is becoming very 
manifest. More and more, because of this our blind faith 
in machinery, because of our want of light to enable us 
to look beyond machinery to the end for which machinery 
is valuable, this and that man, and this and that body 
of men, all over the country, are beginning to assert and 
put in practice an Englishmen’s nght to do what he likes; 


74 Culture and Anarchy 


his right to march where he likes, meet where he likes, 
enter where he likes, hoot as he likes, threaten as he likes, \ 
smash as he likes. All this, I say, tends to anarchy; and | 
though a number of excellent people, and particularly | 
my friends of the Liberal or progressive party, as they’ » 
call themselves, are kind enough to reassure us by saying 
that these are trifles, that a few transient outbreaks of 
rowdyism signify nothing, that our system of liberty is 
one which itself cures all the evils which it works, that 
the educated and intelligent classes stand in overwhelm- 
ing strength and majestic repose, ready, like our military 
force in riots, to act at a moment’s notice,—yet one finds 
that one’s Liberal friends generally say this because they 
have such faith in themselves and their nostrums, when 
they shall return, as the public welfare requires, to place 
and power. But this faith of theirs one cannot exactly 
share, when one has so long had them and their nostrums 
at work, and sees that they have not prevented our com- 
ing to our present embarrassed condition. And one finds, 
also, that the outbreaks of rowdyism tend to become 
less and less of trifles, to become more frequent rather than 
less frequent; and that meanwhile our educated and in- 
telligent classes remain in their majestic repose, and some- 
how or other, whatever happens, their overwhelming 
strength, like our military force in riots, never does act. 
How, indeed, should their overwhelming strength act, 
when the man who gives an inflammatory lecture, or 
breaks down the park railings, or invades a Secretary of 
State’s office, is only following an Englishman’s impulse 
to do as he likes; and our own conscience tells us that we 
ourselves have always regarded this impulse as some- 
thing primary and sacred? Mr. Murphy lectures at 
Birmingham, and showers on the Catholic population of 
that town “words,” says the Home Secretary, “only fit 


Doing as One Likes 75 


to be addressed to thieves or murderers.” What then? 
Mr. Murphy has his own reasons of several kinds. He 
suspects the Roman Catholic Church of designs upon 
Mrs. Murphy; and he says if mayors and magistrates do 
not care for their wives and daughters, he does. But, 
above all, he is doing as he likes; or, in worthier language, 
asserting his personal liberty. “I will carry out my 
lectures if they walk over my body as a dead corpse, 
and I say to the Mayor of Birmingham that he is my 
servant while I am in Birmingham, and as my servant 
he must do his duty and protect me.” ‘Touching and 
beautiful words, which find a sympathetic chord in every 
British -bosom! The moment it is plainly put before 
us that a man is asserting his personal liberty, we are 
half disarmed; because we are believers in freedom, and 
not in some dream of a right reason to which the assertion 
of our freedom is to be subordinated. Accordingly, the 
Secretary of State had to say that although the lec- 
turers language was “‘only fit to be addressed to thieves 
or murderers,” yet, “‘I do not think he is to be deprived, 
I do not think that anything I have said could justify 
the inference that he is to be deprived, of the right of pro- 
tection in a place built by him for the purpose of these 
lectures; because the language was not language which 
afforded grounds for a criminal prosecution.’ No, nor 
to be silenced by Mayor, or Home Secretary, or any ad- 
ministrative authority on earth, simply on their notion 
of what is discreet and reasonable! ‘This is in perfect 
consonance with our public opinion, and with our national 
love for the assertion of personal liberty. 

In quite another department of affairs, an experienced 
and distinguished Chancery Judge relates an incident 
which is just to the same effect as this of Mr. Murphy. 
A testator bequeathed £300 a year, to be for ever applied 


76 Culture and Anarchy 


as a pension to some person who had been unsuccessful 
in literature, and whose duty should be to support, and 
diffuse, by his writings, the testator’s own views, as en- 
forced in the testator’s publications. The views were 
not worth a straw, and the bequest was appealed against 
in the Court of Chancery on the ground of its absurdity; 
but, being only absurd, it was upheld, and the so-called 
charity was established. Having, I say, at the bottom 
of our English hearts a very strong belief in freedom, 
and a very weak belief in right reason, we are soon si- 
lenced when a man pleads the prime right to do as he 
likes, because this is the prime right for ourselves too; 
and even if we attempt now and then to mumble some- 
thing about reason, yet we have ourselves thought so 
little about this and so much about liberty, that we are 
in conscience forced, when our brother Philistine with 
whom we are meddling turns boldly round upon us and 
asks: Have you any light?—to shake our heads ruefully, 
and to let him go his own way after all. 

There are many things to be said on behalf of this ex- 
clusive attention of ours to liberty, and of the relaxed 
habits of government which it has engendered. It is very 
easy to mistake or to exaggerate the sort of anarchy from 
which we are in danger through them. We are not in 
danger from Fenianism, fierce and turbulent as it may 
show itself; for against this our conscience is free enough 
to let us act resolutely and put forth our overwhelming 
strength the moment there is any real need for it. In 
the first place, it never was any part of our creed that the, 
great right and blessedness of an Irishman, or, indeed, | 
of anybody on earth except an Englishman, is to do as | 
he likes; and we can have no scruple at all about abridging, 
if necessary, a non-Englishman’s assertion of personal 
liberty. The British Constitution, its checks, and its 


Doing as One Likes V7 


prime virtues, are for Englishmen. We may extend them 


to others out of love and kindness; but we find no real 


divine law written on our hearts constraining us so to / 
extend them. And then the difference between an Irish. 


Fenian and an English rough is so immense, and the case, 
in dealing with the Fenian, so much more clear! He 1s 
so evidently desperate and dangerous, a man of a con- 
quered race, a Papist, with centuries of ill-usage to in- 
flame him against us, with an alien religion established 
in his country by us at his expense, with no admiration 
of our institutions, no love of our virtues, no talents for 
our business, no turn for our comfort! Show him our 


symbolical Truss Manufactory on the finest site in Europe, , 
and tell him that British industrialism and individualism | 
can bring a man to that, and he remains cold! Evidently, | 
if we deal tenderly with a sentimentalist like this, it is | 


out of pure philanthropy. a 

But with the Hyde Park rioter how different! He is 
our own flesh and blood; he is a Protestant; he is framed 
by nature to do as we do, hate what we hate, love what 
we love; he is capable of feeling the symbolical force of 
the Truss Manufactory; the question of questions, for 
him, is a wages question. That beautiful sentence Sir 
Daniel Gooch quoted to the Swindon workmen, and which 
I treasure as Mrs. Gooch’s Golden Rule, or the Divine 
Injunction ‘‘Be ye Perfect”? done into British,—the sen- 
tence Sir Daniel Gooch’s mother repeated to him every 
morning when he was a boy going to work:—“ Ever re- 
member, my dear Dan, that you should look forward to 
being some day manager of that concern!”’—this truthful 


maxim is perfectly fitted to shine forth in the heart of 


the Hyde Park rough also, and to be his guiding-star 
through life. He has no visionary schemes of revolution 
and transformation, though of course he would like his. 


f 


\ 
i 


78 Culture and Anarchy 


class to rule, as the aristocratic class like their class to 
rule, and the middle class theirs. But meanwhile our 
social machine is a little out of order; there are a good 
many people in our paradisiacal centres of industrialism 
and individualism taking the bread out of one another’s © 
mouths. The rough has not yet quite found his groove 
and settled down to his work, and so he is just asserting 
his personal liberty a little, going where he likes, assem- 
bling where he likes, bawling as he likes, hustling as he 
likes. Just as the rest of us,—as the country squires in 
the aristocratic class, as the political dissenters in the 
middle class;—he has no idea of a State, of the nation 
in its collective and corporate character controlling, as 
government, the free swing of this or that one of its mem- 
bers in the name of the higher reason of all of them, his 
own as well as that of others. He sees the rich, the aristo- 
cratic class, in occupation of the executive government, 
and so if he is stopped from making Hyde Park a bear- 
garden or the streets impassable, he says he is being 
butchered by the aristocracy. 

~ His apparition is somewhat embarrassing, because too 
many cooks spoil the broth; because, while the aristo- 
cratic and middle classes have long been doing as they 
like with great vigour, he has been too undeveloped and 
submissive hitherto to join in the game; and now, when 
he does come, he comes in immense numbers, and is 
rather raw and rough. But he does not break many 
laws, or not many at one time; and, as our laws were 
made for very different circumstances from our present 
(but always with an eye to Englishmen doing as they 
like), and as the clear letter of the law must be against 
our Englishman who does as he likes and not only the 
spirit of the law and public policy, and as Government 
must neither have any discretionary power nor act reso- 


Doing as One Likes 79 


lutely on its own interpretation of the law if any one dis- 
putes it, it is evident our laws give our playful giant, in 
doing as he likes, considerable advantage. Besides, even 
if he can be clearly proved to commit an illegality in 
doing as he likes, there is always the resource of not put- 
ting the law in force, or of abolishing it. So he has his 
way, and if he has his way he is soon satished for the 
time. However, he falls into the habit of taking it oftener 
and oftener, and at last begins to create by his operations 
a confusion of which mischievous people can take advan- 
tage, and which, at any rate, by troubling the common 
course of business throughout the country, tends to cause 
distress, and so to increase the sort of anarchy and social 
disintegration which had previously commenced. And 
thus that profound sense of settled order and security, 


with taking its departure. 

Now, if culture, which simply means trying to_perfect 
oneself, and one’s mind as part of oneself, brings-us light, 
and if light shows us that there is nothing so very blessed 
in merely doing as one likes, that the worship of the mere 
freedom to do as one likes is worship of machinery, that 


the really blessed thing is to like what nght reason or- 


dains, and’to follow her authority, then we have got a 
practical benefit out of culture. We have got a much 
wanted principle, a principle of authority, to counteract 
the tendency to anarchy which seems to be threatening us. 

But how to organize this authority, or to what hands 
to entrust the wielding of it? How to get your State, 
summing up the right reason of the community, and giving 
effect to it, as circumstances may require, with vigour? And 
here I think I see my enemies waiting for me with a hungry 
joy in their eyes. But I shall elude them. 


‘ 


without which a society like ours cannot live and grow} 
at all, sometimes seems to be beginning to threaten us \| 


| 


i, 


80 Culture and Anarchy 


The State, the power most representing the right reason 
of the nation, and most worthy, therefore, of ruling,—of 
exercising, when circumstances require it, authority over 


us all,— is for Mr. Carlyle the aristocracy. For Mr. Lowe, — 


it is the middle class with its incomparable Parliament. 
For the Reform League, it 1s the working class, the class 
with “‘the brightest powers of sympathy and readiest 


powers of action.” Now culture, with its disinterested, 


pursuit of perfection, culture, simply trying to see things | 


as they are in order to seize on the best and to make it 
prevail, is surely well fitted to help us to judge rightly, by 
all the aids of observing, reading, and thinking, the 
qualifications and titles to our confidence of these three 
candidates for authority, and can thus render us a practical 
service of no mean value. } 

So when Mr. Carlyle, a man of genius to whom we 
have all at one time or other been indebted for refreshment 
and stimulus, says we should give rule to the aristocracy, 
mainly because of its dignity and politeness, surely culture 
is useful in reminding us, that in our idea of perfection 
the characters of beauty and intelligence are both of them 
present, and sweetness and light, the two noblest of things, 
are united. Allowing, therefore, with Mr. Carlyle, the 
aristocratic class to possess sweetness, culture insists on 
the necessity of light also, and shows us that aristocracies, 
being by the very nature of things inaccessible to ideas, 
unapt to see how the world is going, must be somewhat 
wanting in light, and must therefore be, at a moment 
when light is our great requisite, inadequate to our needs. 

y Aristocracies, those children of the established fact, are 
' for epochs of concentration. In epochs of expansion, 
epochs such as that in which we now live, epochs when 
always the warning voice is again heard: Now ts the judg- 
ment of this world,—in such epochs aristocracies with their 


Fe 


Doing as One Likes 81 


natural clinging to the established fact, their want of \, 
sense for the flux of things, for the inevitable transitoriness _ 
of all human institutions, are bewildered and_ helpless. 
Their serenity, their high spirit, their power of haughty 
resistance,—the great qualities of an aristocracy, and. 
the secret of its distinguished manners and dignity,—these | 
very qualities, in an epoch of expansion, turn against 
their possessors. Again and again I have said how the 
refinement of an aristocracy may be precious and educative 
to a raw nation as a kind’ of shadow of true refinement; 
how its serenity and dignified freedom from petty cares 
may serve as a useful foil to set off the vulgarity and 
hideousness of that type of life which a hard middle class 
tends to establish, and to help people to see this vulgarity 
and hideousness in their true colours. But the true grace 
and serenity is that of which Greece and Greek art suggest 
the admirable ideals of perfection,—a serenity which \ 
comes from having made order among ideas and harmo- _ 
nised them; whereas the serenity of aristocracies, at least 
the peculiar serenity of aristocracies of Teutonic origin, 
appears to come from their never having had any ideas 
to trouble them. And so, in a time of expansion like the 
present, a time for ideas, one gets perhaps, in regarding 
an aristocracy, even more than the idea of serenity, the 
idea of futility and sterility. 

One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth 
there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive 
how the world is really going, as an ordinary young English- 
man of our upper class. Ideas he has not, and neither has 
he that seriousness of our middle class which is, as I have 
often said, the great strength of this class, and may become 
its salvation. Why, aman may hear a young Dives of the 
aristocratic class, when the whim takes him to sing the 
praises of wealth and material comfort, sing them with a 


$2 Culture and Anarchy 


cynicism from which the conscience of the veriest Philistine 
of our industrial middle class would recoil in affright. 
And when, with the natural sympathy of aristocracies for 
firm dealing with the multitude, and his uneasiness at our — 
feeble dealing with it at home, an unvarnished young 
Englishman of our aristocratic class applauds the absolute 
rulers on the Continent, he in general manages completely 
to miss the grounds of reason and intelligence which alone 
can give any colour of justification, any possibility of 
existence, to those rulers, and applauds them on grounds 
which it would make their own hair stand on end to listen 
to. 

And all this time we are in an epoch of expansion; and 
the essence of an epoch of expansion is a movement of 
ideas, and the one salvation of an epoch of expansion is a 
harmony of ideas. The very principle of the authority 
which we are seeking as a defence against anarchy is 
right reason, ideas, light. The more, therefore, an aristoc- 
racy calls to its aid its innate forces,—its impenetrability, 
its high spirit, its power of haughty resistance,—to deal 
with an epoch of expansion, the graver is the danger, the 
greater the certainty of explosion, the surer the aristoc- 
racy’s defeat; for it is trying to do violence to nature 
instead of working along with it. The best powers shown 
by the best men of an aristocracy at such an epoch are, 
it will be observed, non-aristocratical powers, powers 
of industry, powers of intelligence; and these powers thus 
exhibited, tend really not to strengthen the aristocracy, 
but to take their owners out of it, to expose them to the 
dissolving agencies of thought and change, to make them 
men of the modern spirit and of the future. If, as some- 
times happens, they add to their non-aristocratical qualities 
of labour and thought, a strong dose of aristocratical 
qualities also,—of pride, defiance, turn for resistance,— 


Doing as One Likes 83 


this truly aristocratical side of them, so far from adding 
any strength to them, really neutralises their force and 
makes them impracticable and ineffective. 

Knowing myself to be indeed sadly to seek, as one of 
my many critics says, in “a philosophy with coherent, 
interdependent, subordinate, and derivative principles,” 
I continually have recourse to a plain man’s expedient of 
trying to make what few simple notions [ have, clearer and 
more intelligible to myself by means of example and illus- 
tration. And having been brought up at Oxford in the 
bad old times, when we were stuffed with Greek and 
Aristotle, and thought nothing of preparing ourselves by 
the study of moder languages,—as after Mr. Lowe’s 
great speech at Edinburgh we shall do,—to fight the 
battle of life with the waiters in foreign hotels, my head 
is still full of a lumber of phrases we learnt at Oxford from 
Aristotle, about virtue being in a mean, and about excess 
and defect, and soon. Once when I had had the advantage 
of listening to the Reform debates in the House of Com- 
mons, having heard a number of interesting speakers, 
and among them a well-known lord and a well-known 
baronet, I remember it struck me, applying Aristotle’s 
machinery of the mean to my ideas about our aristocracy, 
that the lord was exactly the perfection, or happy mean, 
or virtue, of aristocracy, and the baronet the excess. 
And I fancied that by observing these two we might see 
both the inadequacy of aristocracy to supply the principle 
of authority needful for our present wants, and the danger . 
of its trying to supply it when it was not really competent 
for the business. On the one hand, in the brilliant lord, 
showing plenty of high spirit, but remarkable, far above 
and beyond his gift of high spirit, for the fine tempering of 
his high spirit, for ease, serenity, politeness,—the great 
virtues, as Mr. Carlyle says, of aristocracy,—in this 


84 Culture and Anarchy 


beautiful and virtuous mean, there seemed evidently 
some insufficiency of light; while, on the other hand, the 
worthy baronet, in whom the high spirit of aristocracy,. 
its impenetrability, defiant courage, and pride of resistance, 
were developed even in excess was manifestly capable, 
if he had his way given him, of causing us great danger, 
and, indeed, of throwing the whole commonwealth into 
confusion. Then I reverted to that old fundamental 
notion of mine about the grand merit of our race being 
really our honesty. And the very helplessness of our 
aristocratic or governing class in dealing with our per- 
turbed social condition, their jealousy of entrusting too 
much power to the State as it now actually exists—that 
is to themselves—gave me a sort of pride and satisfaction; 
because I saw they were, as a whole, too honest to try and 
manage a business for which they did not feel themselves 
capable. 
Surely, now, it is no inconsiderable boon which culture 
confers upon us, if in embarrassed times like the present 
it enables us to look at the ins and the outs of things in 
this way, without hatred and without partiality, and with 
a disposition to see the good in everybody all round. And 
I try to follow just the same course with our middle class 
as with our aristocracy. Mr. Lowe talks to us of this 
strong middle part of the nation, of the unrivalled deeds 
of our Liberal middle-class Parliament, of the noble, the 
heroic work it has performed in the last thirty years; 
and I begin to ask myself if we shall not, then, find in our 
middle class the principle of authority we want, and if 
we had not better take administration as well as legislation 
away from the weak extreme which now administers for 
us, and commit both to the strong middle part. I observe, 
too, that the heroes of middle-class liberalism, such as 
we have hitherto known it, speak with a kind of prophetic 


Doing as One Likes 85 


anticipation of the great destiny which awaits them, and 
as if the future was clearly theirs. The advanced party, 
the progressive party, the party in alliance with the future, 
are the names they like to give themselves. “The princi- 
ples which will obtain recognition in the future,’ says 
Mr. Miall, a personage of deserved eminence among the 
political Dissenters, as they are called, who have been the 
backbone of middle-class liberalism,—‘‘the principles 
which will obtain recognition in the future are the princi- 
ples for which I have long and zealously laboured. I 
qualified myself for joining in the work of harvest by 
doing to the best of my ability the duties of seedtime.” 
These duties, if one is to gather them from the works of 
the great Liberal party in the last thirty years, are, as I 
have elsewhere summed them up, the advocacy of free_ 
trade, of Parliamentary reform, of abolition of church- 
rates, of voluntaryism i in religion and education, of non-__ 
‘interference of the State between employers and employed, 
and of marriage with one’s deceased wife’s sister. 

Now I know, when I object that all this is machinery, 
_ the great Liberal middle class has by this time grown cun- 
ning enough to answer that it always meant more by these 
things than meets the eye; that it has had that within 
which passes show, and that we are soon going to see, in a 
Free Church and all manner of good things, what it was. 
But I have learned from Bishop Wilson (if Mr. Frederic 
Harrison will forgive my again quoting that poor old 
hierophant of a decayed superstition): “If we would 
really know our heart let us impartially view our actions;” 
and [ cannot help thinking that if our Liberals had had so 
much sweetness and light in their inner minds as they 
allege, more of it must have come out in their sayings and 
doings. 

An American friend of the English Liberals says, indeed, 


86 Culture and Anarchy 


that their Dissidence of Dissent has been a mere instrument 
of the political Dissenters for making reason and the will 
of God prevail (and no doubt he would say the same of — 
marriage with one’s deceased wife’s sister); and that the 
abolition of a State Church is merely the Dissenter’s 
means to this end, just as culture is mine. Another Ameri- 
can defender of theirs says just the same of their indus- 
trialism and free trade; indeed, this gentleman, taking 
the bull by the horns, proposes that we should for the 
future call industrialism culture, and the industrialists 
the men of culture, and then of course there can be no 
longer any misapprehension about their true character; 
and besides the pleasure of being wealthy and comfortable, 
they will have authentic recognition as vessels of sweetness 
and light. 

All this is undoubtedly specious; but I must remark 
that the culture of which I talked was an endeavour to 
come at reason and the will of God by means of reading, 
observing, and thinking; and that whoever calls anything 
else culture, may, indeed, call it so if he likes, but then 
he talks of something quite different from what I talked of. 
And, again, as culture’s way of working for reason and the 
will of God is by directly trying to know more about them, 
while the Dissidence of Dissent is evidently 1 in itself no 
effort of this kind, nor is its Free Church, in fact, a church 
with worthier conceptions of God and the ordering of the 
world than the State Church professes, but with mainly 
the same conceptions of these as the State Church has, 
only that every man is to comport himself as he likes in 
, professing them,—this being so, I cannot at once accept 
the Nonconformity any more than the industrialism and 
| the other great works of our Liberal middle class as proof 
|| |positive that this class is in possession of light, and that 
here is the true seat of authority for which we are in search; 


Doing as One Likes 87 


but I must try a little further, and seek for other indications 
which may enable me to make up my mind. 

Why should we not do with the middle class as we have 
done with the aristocratic class,—find in it some repre- 
sentative men who may stand for the virtuous mean of 
this class, for the perfection of its present qualities and 
mode of being, and also for the excess of them. Such men 
must clearly not be men of genius like Mr. Bright; for, 
as I have formerly said, so far as a man has genius he tends 
to take himself out of the category of class altogether, and 
to become simply a man. Some more ordinary man 
would be more to the purpose,—would sum up better 
in himself, without disturbing influences, the general 
liberal force of the middle class, the force by which it has 
done its great works of free trade, Parliamentary reform, 
voluntaryism, and so on, and the spirit in which it has done 
them. Now it happens that a typical middle-class man, 
the member for one of our chief industrial cities, has given 
us a famous sentence which bears directly on the resolution 
of our present question: whether there is light enough 
in our middle class to make it the proper seat of the author- 
ity we wish to establish. When there was a talk some 
little while ago about the state of middle-class education, 
our friend, as the representative of that class, spoke some 
memorable words:—‘“There had been a cry that middle- 
class education ought to receive more attention. He 
confessed himself very much surprised by the clamour that 
was raised. He did not think that class need excite the 
sympathy either of the legislature or the public.””’ Now 
this satisfaction of our middle-class member of Parliament 
with the mental state of the middle class was truly repre- 
sentative, and makes good his claim to stand as the beauti- 
ful and virtuous mean of that class. But it is obviously at 
variance with our definition of culture, or the pursuit 


88 Culture and Anarchy 


of light and perfection, which made light and perfection 
consist, not in resting and being, but in growing and be- 
coming, in a perpetual advance in beauty and wisdom. 
So the middle class is by its essence, as one may say, by its 
incomparable self-satisfaction decisively expressed through | 
its beautiful and virtuous mean, _ self-excluded from wield- 
ing an ‘authority of which light is to be the very-souk——-~ 
Clear as this is, it will be made clearer still if we take 
some representative man as the excess of the middle class, 
and remember that the middle class, in general, is to be 
conceived as a body swaying between the qualities of its 
mean and of its excess, and on the whole, of course, as 
human nature is constituted, inclining rather towards 
the excess than the mean. Of its excess no better repre- 
sentative can possibly be imagined than a Dissenting 
minister from Walsall, who came before the public in 
connection with the proceedings at Birmingham of Mr. 
Murphy, already mentioned. Speaking in the midst of an 
irritated population of Catholics, this Walsall gentleman 
exclaimed: “I say, then, away with the Mass! It is 
from the bottomless pit; and in the bottomless pit shall 
all liars have their part, in the lake that burneth with fire 
and brimstone.”” And again: “When all the praties were 
black in Ireland, why didn’t the priests say the hocus- 
pocus over them, and make them all good again?” He 
shared, too, Mr. Murphy’s fears of some invasion of his 
domestic happiness: “What I wish to say to you as 
Protestant husbands is, Take care of your wives!’ And 
finally, in the true vein of an Englishman doing as he likes, 
a vein of which I have at some length pointed out the 
present dangers, he recommended for imitation the example 
of some churchwardens at Dublin, among whom, said he, 
“there was a Luther and also a Melanchthon,” who had 
made very short work with some ritualist or other, hauled 


Doing as One Likes 89 


him down from his pulpit, and kicked him out of church. 
Now it is manifest, as I said in the case of our aristocratical 
baronet, that if we let this excess of the sturdy English 
middle class, this conscientious Protestant Dissenter, so 
strong, so self-reliant, so fully persuaded in his own mind, 
have his way, he would be capable, with his want of light,— 
or, to use the language of the religious world, with his 
zeal without knowledge,—of stirring up strife which 
neither he nor any one else could easily compose. 

And then comes in, as it did also with the aristocracy, 
the honesty of our race, and by the voice of another middle- 
class man, Alderman of the City of London and Colonel 
of the City of London Militia, proclaims that it has 
twinges of conscience, and that it will not attempt to 
cope with our social disorders, and to deal with a business 
which it feels to be too high for it. Every one remembers 
how this virtuous Alderman-Colonel, or Colonel-Alderman, 
led his militia through the London streets; how the by- 
standers gathered to see him pass; how the London roughs, 
asserting an Englishman’s best and most blissful right 
of doing what he likes, robbed and beat the bystanders; 
and how the blameless warrior-magistrate refused to 
let his troops interfere. “The crowd,” he touchingly 
said afterwards, ““was mostly composed of fine healthy 
strong men, bent on mischief; if he had allowed his soldiers 
to interfere they might have been overpowered, their 
rifles taken from them and used against them by the mob; 
a riot, in fact, might have ensued, and been attended with 
bloodshed, compared with which the assaults and loss of 
property that actually occurred would have been as noth- 
ing.’ Honest and affecting testimony of the English 
middle class to its own inadequacy for the authoritative 
part one’s admiration would sometimes incline one’ to 
assign to it! ‘‘Who are we,” they say by the voice of their 


90 Culture and Anarchy 


* Alderman-Colonel, “that we should not be overpowered 
if we attempt to cope with social anarchy, our rifles taken 
from us and used against us by the mob, and we, perhaps, 


robbed and beaten ourselves? Or what light have we,)' 
beyond a free-born Englishman’s impulse to do as he likes, \\ 
which could justify us in preventing, at the cost of blood- 1 


shed, other free-born Englishmen from doing as they like, / 


and robbing and beating us as much as they please?” 

This distrust of themselves as an adequate centre 
of authority does not mark the working class, as was 
shown by their readiness the other day in Hyde Park to 
take upon themselves all the functions of government. 
But this comes from the working class being, as I have 
often said, still an embryo, of which no one can yet quite 
foresee the final development; and from its not having 
the same experience and self-knowledge as the aristocratic 
and middle classes. Honesty it no doubt has, just like 
the other classes of Englishmen, but honesty in an inchoate 
and untrained state; and meanwhile its powers of action, 
which are, as Mr. Frederic Harrison says, exceedingly 
ready, easily run away with it. That it cannot at present 
have a sufficiency of light which comes by culture,—that 
is, by reading, observing, and thinking,—is clear from the 
very nature of its condition; and, indeed, we saw that Mr. 
Frederic Harrison, in seeking to make a free stage for its 
bright powers of sympathy and ready powers of action, 
had to begin by throwing overboard culture, and flouting 
it as only fit for a professor of belles-lettres. Still, to make 
it perfectly manifest that no more in the working class 
than in the aristocratic and middle classes can one find an 
adequate centre of authority,—that is, as culture teaches) 
us to conceive our required authority, of light,—let us) 
again follow, with this class, the method we have followed 
with the aristocratic and middle classes, and try to bring 


t 


t 


\ 


L 


Doing as One Likes 91 


before our minds representative men, who may figure to 
us its virtue and its excess. 

We must not take, of course, men like the chiefs of the 
Hyde Park demonstration, Colonel Dickson or Mr. Beales; 
because Colonel Dickson, by his martial profession and 
dashing exterior, seems to belong properly, like Julius 
Czsar and Mirabeau and other great popular leaders, to 
the aristocratic class, and to be carried into the popular 
ranks only by his ambition or his genius; while Mr. 
Beales belongs to our solid middle class, and, perhaps, 
if he had not been a great popular leader, would have been 
a Philistine. But Mr. Odger, whose speeches we have all 
read, and of whom his friends relate, besides, much that 
is favourable, may very well stand for the beautiful and 
virtuous mean of our present working class; and J think 
everybody will admit that in Mr. Odger there is manifestly, 
with all his good points, some insufficiency of light. The 
excess of the working class, in its present state of develop- 
ment, 1s perhaps best shown in Mr. Bradlaugh, the icon- 
oclast, who seems to be almost for baptizing us all in blood 
and fire into his new social dispensation, and to whose 
reflections, now that I have once been set going on Bishop 
Wilson’s track, I cannot forbear commending this maxim 
of the good old man: “Intemperance in talk makes a 
dreadful havoc in the heart.” Mr. Bradlaugh, like our 
types of excess in the aristocratic and middle classes, is 
evidently capable, if he had his head given him, of running 
us all into great dangers and confusion. I conclude, there- 
fore,—what indeed, few of those who do me the honour 
to read this disquisition are likely to dispute,—that we 
can as little find in the working class as in the aristocratic 
or in the middle class our much-wanted source of authority, 
as culture suggests it to us. 

Well, then, what if we tried to rise above the idea 


92 Culture and Anarchy 


fof class to the idea of the whole community, the State, 
_ and to find our centre of light and authority there? Every 


one of us has the idea of country, as a sentiment; hardly 
any one of us has the idea of the State, as a working power. 
And why? Because we habitually live in our ordinary 
selves, which do not carry us beyond the ideas and wishes 
of the class to which we happen to belong. And we are 
all afraid of giving to the State too much power, because 
we only conceive of the State as something equivalent to 
the class in occupation of the executive government, and 
are afraid of that class abusing power to its own purposes. 
If we strengthen the State with the aristocratic class in 
occupation of the executive government, we imagine 
we are delivering ourselves up captive to the ideas and 
wishes of our fierce aristocratical baronet; 1f with the 
middle class in occupation of the executive government, 
to those of our truculent middle-class Dissenting minister; 
if with the working class, to those of its notorious tribune, 
Mr. Bradlaugh. And with much justice; owing to the 
exaggerated notion which we English, as I have said, 
entertain of the right and blessedness of the mere doing 
as one likes, of the affirming oneself, and oneself just as it 
is. People of the aristocratic class want_to affirm their 
ordinary selves; their likings and dislikings; people of the 
middle class thesame, people of the” working “class” ‘the 
sameé. By our every day selves, however, we are separate, 
personal;"at war; we are only safe from one another’s 
tyranny when no one has any power; and this safety, in 
its turn, cannot save us from anarchy. And when, there- 
fore, anarchy presents itself as a danger to us, we know 
not where to turn. 

But by our dest self we are united, impersonal, at har-_ 
mony. We are in no peril from giving authority to this, 
because it is the truest friend we all of us can have; and 


Doing as One Likes 93. 


when anarchy is a danger to us, to this authority we may 
turn with sure trust. Well, and this is the very self which 
culture, or the study of perfection, seeks to develop in us; 
at the expense of our old untransformed self, taking pleas- , 
ure only in doing what it likes or 1s used to do, and exposing 
us to the risk of clashing with every one else who is doing 
the same! So that our poor culture, which is flouted as so 
unpractical, leads us to the very ideas capable of meeting 
the great want of our present embarrassed times! We 
want an authority, and we find nothing but jealous 
classes, checks, and a deadlock; culture suggests the idea 
of the State. We find no basis for a firm State-power in ' 
our ordinary selves; culture suggests one to us in our Jest 
self. Die 3 

It cannot but acutely try a tender conscience to be 
accused, in a practical country like ours, of keeping aloof 
from the work and hope of a multitude of earnest-hearted 
men, and of merely toying with poetry and zsthetics. 
So it is with no little sense of relief that I find myself 
thus in the position of one who makes a contribution in 
aid of the practical necessities of our times. | The great 
thing, it will be observed, is to find our best self, and to 
seek to afirm nothing but that; not,—as we English with 
our over-value for merely being free and busy have been 
so accustomed to do,—resting satisfied with a self which 
comes uppermost long before our best self, and affirm- 
ing that with blind energy. In short,—to go back yet 
once more to Bishop Wilson,—of these two excellent rules 
of Bishop Wilson’s for a man’s guidance: “Firstly, never 
go against the best light you have; secondly, take care 
that your light be not darkness,’’ we English have fol- 
lowed with praiseworthy zeal the first rule, but we have 
not given so much heed to the second. We have gone 
manfully according to the best light we have; but we 


94 Culture and Anarchy 


have not taken enough care that this should be really 
the best light possible for us, that it should not be dark- 
ness. And, our honesty being very great, conscience has 
whispered to, us that the light we were following, our 
ordinary self, was, indeed, perhaps, only an inferior self, 
only darkness; and that it would not do to impose this 
seriously on all the world. 
But our best self inspires faith, and is capable of af- 
fording a serious principle of authority. For example. 
We are on our way to what the late Duke of Wellington, 
with his strong sagacity, foresaw and admirably de- 
scribed as “a revolution by due course of law.” This 
is undoubtedly,—if we are still to live and grow, and this 
famous nation is not to stagnate and dwindle away on 
the one hand, or, on the other, to perish miserably in 
mere anarchy and confusion,—what we are on the way 
to. Great changes there must be, for a revolution can- 
not accomplish itself without great changes; yet order 
there must be, for without order a revolution cannot ac- 
complish itself by due course of law. So whatever brings 
risk of tumult and disorder, multitudinous processions 
in the streets of our crowded towns, multitudinous meet- 
rings in their public places and parks,—demonstrations 
_ perfectly unnecessary in the present course of our affairs,— 
_ our best self, or right reason, plainly enjoins us to set 
| our faces against. It enjoins us to encourage and uphold 
fi the occupants of the executive power, whoever they may 

\ \be, in firmly prohibiting them. But it does this clearly 
‘“ and resolutely, and is thus a real principle of authority, 
because it does it with a free conscience; because in thus 
provisionally strengthening the executive power, it knows 
that it is not doing this merely to enable our aristocratical 
baronet to affirm himself as against our working-men’s 
tribune, or our middle-class Dissenter to affirm himself 


Doing as One Likes 95 


as against both. It knows that it is establishing the 

|_State,_or organ of our.collective-best-self; of our national 
right reason. And it has the testimony of conscience 
that it is stablishing the State on behalf of whatever great 
changes are needed, just as much as on behalf of order; 
stablishing it to deal just as stringently, when the time 
comes, with our baronet’s aristocratical prejudices, or 
with the fanaticism of our middle-class Dissenter, as it 
deals with Mr. Bradlaugh’s street-processions. 


CHAPTERS 


BARBARIANS, PHILISTINES, POPULACE 


From a man without a philosophy no one can expect 
philosophical completeness. Therefore I may observe 
without shame, that in trying to get a distinct notion 
of our aristocratic, our middle, and our working class, 
with a view of testing the claims of each of these classes 
to become a centre of authority, I have omitted, I find, 
to complete the old-fashioned analysis which I had the 
fancy of applying, and have not shown in these classes, 
as well as the virtuous mean and the excess, the defect 
also. I do not know that the omission very much matters. 
Still, as clearness is the one merit which a plain, unsys- 
tematic writer, without a philosophy, can hope to have, 
and as our notion of the three great English classes may 
perhaps be made clearer if we see their distinctive quali- 
ties in the defect, as well as in the excess and in the mean, 
-let us try, before proceeding further, to remedy this 
omission. 

It is manifest, if the perfect and virtuous mean of that 
fine spirit which is the distinctive quality of aristocracies, 
is to be found in a high, chivalrous style, and its excess 
/ in a fierce turn for resistance, that its defect must lie in 
a spirit not bold and high enough, and in an excessive 
\.and pusillanimous unaptness for resistance. If, again, 
the perfect and virtuous mean of that force by which our 
middle class has done its great works, and of that self- 
reliance with which it contemplates itself and them, is 
to be seen in the performances and speeches of our com- 
mercial member of Parliament, and the excess of that 

96 


ee a 


Barbarians, Philistines, Populace 97 


force and of that self-reliance in the performances and 
speeches of our fanatical Dissenting minister, then it 1s 
-manifest.that their defect must lie in a helpless inapti- 
tude for the great works of the middle class, and in a poor 
and despicable lack of its self-satisfaction. 

To be chosen to exemplify the happy mean of a good 
quality, or set of good qualities, is evidently a praise to 
a man; nay, to be chosen to exemplify even their excess, 
is a kind of praise. Therefore I could have no hesita- 
tion in taking actual personages to exemplify, respec- 
tively, the mean and the excess of aristocratic and 
middle-class qualities. But perhaps there might be a 
want of urbanity in singling out this or that personage as 
the representative of defect. ‘Therefore I shall leave 
the defect of aristocracy unillustrated by any represent- 
ative man. But with oneself one may always, without 
impropriety, deal quite freely; and, indeed, this sort of 
plain-dealing with oneself has in it, as all the moralists 
tell us, something very wholesome. So I will venture to 
humbly offer myself as an illustration of defect in those 
forces and qualities which make our middle class what 
it is. The-too well-founded reproaches of my opponents 
declare how little I have lent a hand to the great works 
of the middle class; for it is evidently these works, and 
my slackness at them, which are meant, when I am said 
to “refuse to lend a hand to the humble operation of 
uprooting certain definite evils” (such as church-rates 
and others), and that therefore “‘the believers in action 
grow impatient” with me. The line, again, of a still un- 
satisfied seeker which I have followed, the idea of self- 
transformation, of growing towards some measure of 
sweetness and light not yet reached, is evidently at clean 
variance with the perfect self-satisfaction current in my 
class, the middle class, and may serve to indicate in me, 


98 Culture and Anarchy 


therefore, the extreme defect of this feeling. But these 
confessions, though salutary, are bitter and unpleasant. 

To pass, then, to the working class. The defect of 
this class would be the falling short in what Mr. Frederic 

pfHarrison calls those “bright powers of sympathy and 

' ready powers of action,” of which we saw in Mr. Odger 
the virtuous mean, and in Mr. Bradlaugh the excess. 
The working class is so fast growing and rising at the 
present time, that instances of this defect cannot well 
be now very common. Perhaps Canning’s “Needy 
Knife-Grinder”’ (who is dead, and therefore cannot be 
pained at my taking him for an illustration) may serve 
to give us the notion of defect in the essential quality of 
a working class; or I might even cite (since, though he 
is alive in the flesh, he is dead to all heed of criticism) 
my poor old poaching friend, Zephaniah Diggs, who, 
between his hare-snaring and his gin-drinking, has got 
his powers of sympathy quite dulled and his powers of 
action in any great movement of his class hopelessly im- 
paired. But examples of this defect belong, as I have 
said, to a bygone age rather than to the present. 

The same desire for clearness, which has led me thus 
to extend a little my first analysis of the three great 
classes of English society, prompts me also to improve 
my nomenclature for them a little, with a view to making 
it thereby more manageable. It is awkward and tiresome 
to be always saying the aristocratic class, the middle 
class, the working class. For the middle class, for that 
great body which, as we know, “has done all the great 

things that have been done in all departments,” and 
which is to be conceived as moving between its two car- 
dinal points of our commercial member of Parliament 
and our fanatical Protestant Dissenter,—for this class 
we have a designation which now has become pretty well 


Barbarians, Philistines, Populace 99 


known, and which we may as well still keep for them, the 
designation of Philistines. What this term means I have 
so often explained that I need not repeat it here. For 
the aristocratic class, conceived mainly as a body moving 
between the two cardinal points of our chivalrous lord 
and our defiant baronet, we have as yet got no special 
designation. Almost all my attention has naturally been 
concentrated on my own class, the middle class, with 
which I am in closest sympathy, and which has been, 
besides, the great power of our day, and has had its 
praises sung by all speakers and newspapers. 

Still the aristocratic class is so important in itself, and 
the weighty functions which Mr. Carlyle proposes at 
the present critical time to commit to it, must add so 
much to its importance, that it seems neglectful, and a 
strong instance of that want of coherent philosophic 
method for which Mr. Frederic Harrison blames me, to 
leave the aristocratic class so much without notice and 
denomination. It may be thought that the characteristic 
which I have occasionally mentioned as proper to aris- 
tocracies,—their natural inaccessibility, as children of 
the established fact, to ideas,—points to our extending 
to this class also the designation of Philistines; the Phil- 
‘fistine being, as is well known, the enemy of the children 
| of light or servants of the idea. Nevertheless, there 
“seems to be an inconvenience in thus giving one and the 
same designation to two very different classes; and be- 
sides, if we look into the thing closely, we shall find that 
the term Philistine conveys a sense which makes it more 
peculiarly appropriate to our middle class than to our 
f aristocratic. For Philistine gives the notion of some- 
_ thing particularly stiff-necked and perverse in the resist- 
\.ance to light and its children; and therein it specially 

suits our middle class, who not only do not pursue sweet- 


Zz 


100 _ Culture and Anarchy 


ness and light, but who even prefer to them that sort of 
machinery of business, chapels, tea-meetings, and ad- 
dresses from Mr. Murphy, which makes up the dismal 
and illiberal life on which I have so often touched. But 
the aristocratic class has actually, as we have seen, in 
its well-known politeness, a kind of image or shadow of 
sweetness; and as for light, if it does not pursue light, 
\is is not that it perversely cherishes some dismal and 1il- 
“iberal existence in preference to light, but it is lured off 
from following light by those mighty and eternal seducers 
of our race which weave for this class their most irresistible 
charms,—by worldly splendour, security, power, and 
pleasure./ These seducers are exterior goods, but in a 
way they are goods; and he who is hindered by them from 
caring for light and ideas, is not so much doing what is 
perverse as what is too natural. 
’ Keeping this in view, I have in my own mind often 
indulged myself with the fancy of employing, in order 
to designate our aristocratic class, the name of The Bar- 
barians. The Barbarians, to whom we all owe so much, 
and who reinvigorated and renewed our worn-out Europe, 
had, as is well known, eminent merits; and in this country, 
where we are for the most part sprung from the Barbarians, 
we have never had the prejudice against them which pre- 
vails among the races of Latin origin. The Barbarians | 
orought with them that staunch individualism, as the | 
modern phrase is, and that passion for doing as one likes, 
for the assertion of personal liberty, which appears to Mr. 
Bright the central idea of English life, and of which we 
have, at any rate, a very rich supply. The stronghold 
and natural seat of this passion was in the nobles of whom 
our. aristocratic class are the inheritors; and this class, 
accordingly, have signally manifested it, and have done 
much by their example to recommend it to the body of 


Barbarians, Philistines, Populace 101 


the nation, who already, indeed, had it in their blood. 
The Barbarians, again, had the passion for field-sports; 
and they have handed it on to our aristocratic class, who 
of this passion too, as of the passion for asserting one’s 
personal liberty, are the great natural stronghold. The 
care of the Barbarians for the body, and for all manly 


~~ exercises; the vigour, good looks, and fine complexion 


which they acquired and perpetuated in their families 
by these means,—all this may be observed still in our 
aristocratic class. The chivalry of the Barbarians, with 
its characteristics of high~spirit,.choice..manners,- and 
distinguished bearing,—what.is.this but the attractive. 
3 commencement of the.politeness.of.our aristocratic class? 
In’some Barbarian noble, no doubt, one would have 
admired, if one could have been then alive to see it, the 
rudiments of our politest peer. Only, all this culture_(to 
call it by that name) of the Barbarians was an exterior. 
culture mainly. It consisted principally in outward gifts 
and graces, in looks, manners, accomplishments, prowess. 

The chief inward gifts which had part in it were the most 
exterior, so to speak, of inward gifts, those which come 
nearest to outward ones; they were courage, a high spirit, 

self-confidence.’ Far within, and unawakened, lay a whole 
range of powers of thought and feeling, to which these 
interesting productions of nature had, from the circum- 
stances of their life, no access. Making allowances for 
the difference of the times, surely we can observe. precisely 
the same thing now in our aristocratic class. _In general 
its culture is extérior chiefly; all the exterior graces and 
accomplishments, and the more external of the inward.. 
virtues, seem to be principally its portion. It now, of 
course, cannot but be often in contact with those studies 
by which, from the world of thought and feeling, true 
culture teaches us to fetch sweetness and light; but its 


/ 


102 Culture and Anarchy © 


hold upon these very studies appears remarkably external, 
and unable to exert any deep power upon its spirit. There- 
fore the one insufficiency which we noted in the perfect 
mean of this class was an insufhciency of light. And owing 
to the same causes, does not a subtle criticism lead us to 
make even on the good looks and politeness of our aristo- 
cratic class, and of even the most fascinating half of that 
class, the feminine half, the one qualifying remark, that 
perfection, a shade more soul? | 

I often, therefore, when I want to distinguish clearly 
the aristocratic class from the Philistines proper, or middle 
class, name the former, in my own mind, the Barbarians. 
And when I go through the country, and see this and that 
beautiful and imposing seat of theirs crowning the land- 
scape, “‘There,” I say to myself, “is a great fortified post 
of the Barbarians.” 

It 1s obvious that that part of the working class which, 
working diligently by the light of Mrs. Gooch’s Golden 
Rule, looks forward to the happy day when it will sit on 
thrones with commercial members of Parliament and 
other middle-class potentates, to survey, as Mr. Bright 
beautifully says, “the cities it has built, the railroads it 
has made, the manufacturer it has produced, the cargoes 
which freight the ships of the greatest mercantile navy 
the world has ever seen,’—it 1s obvious, I say, that this 
part of the working class is, or is in a fair way to be, one 
in spirit with the industrial middle class. It 1s notorious 
that our middle-class Liberals have long looked forward 
to this consummation, when the working class shall join 
forces with them, aid them heartily to carry forward their 
great works, go in a body to their tea-meetings, and, in 
short, enable them to bring about their millennium. That 
part of the working class, therefore, which does really 


Barbarians, Philistines, Populace 103 


seem to lend itself to these great aims, may, with propriety, 
be numbered by us among the Philistines. That part of 
it, again, which so much occupies the attention of philan- 
thropists at present,—the part which gives all its energies 
to organising itself, through trades’ unions and other 
means, sO as to constitute, first, a great working-class 
power independent of the middle and aristocratic classes, 
and then, by dint of numbers, give the law to them and 
itself reign absolutely,—this lively and promising part 
must also, according to our definition, go with the Phil- 
istines; because it is its class and its class instinct which it 
seeks to afirm—its ordinary self, not its best self; and it 
is a machinery, an industrial machinery, and power and 
pre-eminence and other external goods, which fil its 
thoughts, and not an inward perfection. It is wholly 
occupied, according to Plato’s subtle expression, with the 
things of itself and not its real self, with the things of the 
State and not the real State. But that vast portion, lastly, 
of the working class which, raw-and-half developed; has” 
long tain half-hidden amidst its poverty and squalor,.and 
18 HOW issuing from its hiding-place to assert an English- 
man’s heavén-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is 
beginning to “perplex us by marching where it likes, meet- 
ing where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it 
likes,—to this vast residuum we may with great propriety 
give the name of Populace..... 

“Phus we" Have got ee inher terms, Barbarians, 
Philistines, Populace, to denote roughly the three great 
classes into which our society is divided; and though this 
humble attempt at a scientific nomenclature falls, no 
doubt, very far short in precision of what might be re- 
quired from a writer equipped with a complete and co- 
herent philosophy, yet, from a notoriously unsystematic 


104 Culture and Anarchy 


and unpretending writer, it will, I trust, be acoo pe as 
sufficient. 

But in using this new, and, I hope, convenient division 
of English society, two things are to be borne in mind. 
The first is, that since, under all our class divisions, there 
is a common basis of human nature, therefore, in every 
one of us, whether we be properly Barbarians, Philistines, 
or Populace, there exists, sometimes only in germ and po- 
tentially, sometimes more or less developed, the same 
tendencies and passions which have made our fellow- 
citizens of other classes what they are. This consideration 
is very important, because it has great influence in beget- 
ting that spirit of indulgence which is a necessary part of 
sweetness, and which, indeed, when our culture is com- 
plete, is, as I have said, inexhaustible. (Thus, an English 
Barbarian who examines himself will, in general, find him- 
self to be not so entirely a Barbarian but that he has in 
him, also, something of the Philistine, and even something 
of the Populace as well. ‘And the same with Englishmen 
of the two other classes. _ 

This is an experience which we may all verify every 
day. For instance, I myself (I again take myself as a sort 
of corpus vile to serve for illustration in a matter where 
serving for illustration may not by every one be thought 
agreeable), I myself am properly a _ Philistine,—Mr. 
Swinburne would add, the son of a Philistine. And al- 
though, through circumstances which will perhaps one day 
be known if ever the affecting history of my conversion 
comes to be written, I have, for the most part, broken with 
the ideas and the tea-meetings of my own class, yet I have 
not, on that account, been brought much the nearer to the 
ideas and works of the Barbarians or of the Populace. 
Nevertheless, I never take a gun or a fishing-rod in my 
hands without feeling that I have in the ground of my 


Barbarians, Philistines, Populace 105 


nature the self-same seeds which, fostered by circum- 
stances, do so much to make the Barbarian; and that, 
with the Barbarian’s advantages, I might have rivalled 
him. Place me in one of his great fortified posts, with 
these seeds of a love for field-sports sown in my nature, 
with all the means of developing them, with all pleasures 
at my command, with most whom I met deferring to me, 
every one I met smiling on me, and with every appearance 
of permanence and security before me and behind me,— 
then | too might have grown, I feel, into a very passable 
child of the established fact, of commendable spirit and 
politeness, and, at the same time, a little inaccessible to 
ideas and light; not, of course, with either the eminent 
fine spirit of our type of aristocratic perfection, or the 
eminent turn for resistance lof our type of aristocratic 
excess, but, according to the measure of the common run 
of mankind, something between the two. And as to the 
Populace, who, whether he be Barbarian or Philistine, can 
look at them without sympathy, when he remembers how 
often,—every time that we snatch up a vehement opinion 
in ignorance and passion, every time that we long to crush 
an adversary by sheer violence, every time that we are 
envious, every time that we are brutal, every time that we 
adore mere power or success, every time that we add our 
voice to swell a blind clamour against some unpopular 
personage, every time that we trample savagely on the 
fallen,n—he has found in his own bosom the eternal 
spirit of the Populace, and that there needs only a little 
help from circumstances to make it triumph in one un- 
tamably. 

The second thing to be borne in mind I have indicated 
several times already. Itisthis. All of us, so far as we are 
Barbarians, Philistines, or Populace, imagine happiness 
to consist in doing what one’s ordinary self likes. What 


106 Culture and Anarchy 


one’s ordinary self likes differs according to the class to 
which one belongs, and has its severer and its lighter 
side; always, however, remaining machinery, and nothing 
more. The graver_self of the Barbarian likes honours 
and consideration; _his~-more relaxed self, field-sports 
and pleasure. The graver self of one kindof Philistine 
likes fanaticism, Meier and money- -making; his. more 
relaxed~sélf, comfort and tea-meetings. Of another kind 
of Philistine; the graver self likes rattening; the relaxed 
self, deputations, or hearing Mr. Odger speak. The 
sterner self of the.Populace likes bawling, hustling, and 
smashing; the lighter.self, beer. “But in each class there 
are born a certain number of natures with a curiosity 
about their best self, with a bent for seeing things as they 
are, for disentangling themselves from machinery, for 
simply concerning themselves with reason and the will 
of God, and doing their best to make these prevail;— 
for the pursuit, in a word, of perfection. To certain | 
manifestations of this love for perfection mankind have | 
accustomed themselves to give the name of genius; im- / 
plying, by this name, something original and heaven- 
bestowed in the passion. But the passion is to be found 
far beyond those manifestations of it to which the world 
usually gives the name of genius, and in which there is, 
for the most part, a talent of some kind or other, a special 
and striking faculty of execution, informed by the heaven- 
bestowed ardour, or genius. It is to be found in many 
manifestations besides these, and may best be called, as 
we have called it, the love and pursuit of perfection; 
culture being the true nurse of the pursuing love, and 
sweetness and light the true character of the pursued 
perfection. Natures with this bent emerge in all classes, 
—among the Barbarians, among the Philistines, among 
the Populace. And this bent always tends to take them 


; 


Barbarians, Philistines, Populace 107 


out of their class, and to make their distinguishing char- 
acteristic not their Barbarianism or their Philistinism, 
but their humanity. They have, in general, a rough time 
of it in their lives; but they are sown more abundantly 
than one might think, they appear where and when one 
_leasts expects it, they set up a fire which enfilades, so to 
speak, the class with which they are ranked; and, in gen- 
eral, by the extrication of their best self as the self to 
develop, and by the simplicity of the ends fixed by them 
as paramount, they hinder the unchecked predominance 
of that class-life which is the affirmation of our ordinary 
self, and seasonably disconcert mankind in their worship 
of machinery. 

Therefore, when we speak of ourselves as divided into 
Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace, we must be under- 
stood always to imply that within each of these classes 
there are a certain number of aliens, if we may so call 
them,—persons who are mainly led, not by their class 
spirit, but by a general humane spirit, by the love of 
human _ perfection; and that this number is capable of 
being diminished or augmented. I mean, the number 
of those who will succeed in developing this happy in- 
stinct will be greater or smaller, in proportion both to 
the force of the original instinct within them, and to 
the hindrance or encouragement which it meets with 
from without. In almost all who have it, it is mixed 
with some infusion of the spirit of an ordinary self, some 
quantity of class-instinct, and even, as has been shown, 
of more than one class-instinct at the same time; so that, 
in general, the extrication of the best self, the predomi- 
nance of the humane instinct, will very much depend upon 
its meeting, or not, with what is fitted to help and elicit 
it. At a moment, therefore, when it is agreed that we 
want a source of authority, and when it seems probable 


4 


108 Culture and Anarchy 


that the right source is our best self, 1t becomes of vast 
importance to see whether or not the things around us 
are, in general, such as to help and elicit our best 
self, and if they are not, to see why they are not, and the 
most promising way of mending them. 

« Now, it is clear that the very absence of any powerful 
authority amongst us, and the prevalent doctrine of the 
duty and happiness of doing as one likes, and asserting 
our personal liberty, must tend to prevent the erection 

‘of any very strict standard of excellence, the belief in 
‘any very paramount authority of right reason, the rec- 
ognition of our best self as anything very recondite and 
hard to come at. It may be, as I have said, a proof of 
our honesty that we do not attempt to give to our ordinary 
self, as we have it in action, predominant authority, and 
to impose its rule upon other people. But it is evident 
also, that it is not easy, with our style of proceeding, 
to get beyond the notion of an ordinary self at all, or 
to get the paramount authority of a commanding best 
self, or right reason, recognised. The learned Martinus 
Scriblerus well says:—‘‘the taste of the bathos is im- 
planted by nature itself in the soul of man; till, perverted 
by custom or example, he is taught, or rather compelled, 
to relish the sublime.” But with us everything seems 
directed to prevent any such perversion of us by custom 
or example as might compel us to relish the sublime; 
by all means we are encouraged to keep our natural taste 
for the bathos unimpaired. 

I have formerly pointed out how in literature the ab- 
sence of any authoritative centre, like an Academy, tends 
to do this. Each section of the public has its own literary 
organ, and the mass of the public is without any suspicion 
that the value of these organs is relative to their being 
nearer a certain ideal centre of correct information, taste, 


Barbarians, Philistines, Populace 109 


and intelligence, or farther away from it. I have said 
that within certain limits, which any one who is likely 
to read this will have no difficulty in drawing for himself, 
my old adversary, the Saturday Review, may, on matters 
of literature and taste, be fairly enough regarded, rela- 
tively to the mass o° newspapers which treat these mat- 
ters, as a kind of organ of reason. But I remember once 
conversing with a company of Nonconformist admirers 
of some lecturer who had let off a great firework, which 
the Saturday Review said was all noise and false lights, 
and feeling my way as tenderly as I could about the effect 
of this unfavourable judgment upon those with whom 
I was conversing. ‘‘Oh,” said one who was their spokes- 
man, with the most tranquil air of conviction, “it is true 
the Saturday Review abuses the lecture, but the British 
Banner” (1 am not quite sure it was the British Banner, 
but it was some newspaper of that stamp) “‘says that the 
Saturday Review is quite wrong.” ‘The speaker had evi- 
dently no notion that there was a scale of value for judg- 
ments on these topics, and that the judgments of the 
Saturday Review ranked high on this scale, and those of 
the British Banner low; the taste of the bathos implanted 
by nature in the literary judgments of man had never, 
in my friend’s case, encountered any let or hindrance. 

Just the same in religion as in literature. We have 
most of us little idea of a high standard to choose our 
guides by, of a great and profound spirit which is an 
authority while inferior spirits are none. It is enough 
to give importance to things that this or that person says 
them decisively, and has a large following of some strong 
kind when he says them. This habit of ours is very well 
shown in that able and interesting work of Mr. Hepworth 
Dixon’s, which we were all reading lately, The Mormons, 
by One of Themselves. Here, again, I am not quite sure 


110 Culture and Anarchy 


that my memory serves me as to the exact title, but I 
mean the well-known book in which Mr. Hepworth Dixon 
described the Mormons, and other similar religious bodies 
in America, with so much detail and such warm sympathy. 
In this work it seems enough for Mr. Dixon that this or 
that doctrine has its Rabbi, who talks big to him, has a 
staunch body of disciples, and, above all, has plenty of 
rifles. That there are any further stricter tests to be 
applied to a doctrine, before it is pronounced important, 
never seems to occur to him. “It is easy to say,” he 
writes of the Mormons, ‘‘that these saints are dupes and 
fanatics, to laugh at Joe Smith and his church, but what 
then? The great facts remain. Young and his people 
are at Utah; a church of 200,000 souls; an army of 
20,000 rifles.” But if the followers of a doctrine are 
really dupes, or worse, and its promulgators are really 
fanatics, or worse, it gives the doctrine no seriousness 


or authority the more that there should be found 200,000 \ 


souls,—200,000 of the innumerable multitude with a 
natural taste for the bathos,—to hold it, and 20,000 rifles 
to defend it. And again, of another religious organisa- 
tion in America: “A fair and open field is not to be re- 
fused when hosts so mighty throw down wager of battle 
on behalf of what they hold to be true, however strange 
their faith may seem.” A fair and open field is not to 
be refused to any speaker; but this solemn way of herald- 
ing him is quite out of place, unless he has, for the best 
reason and spirit of man, some significance.\/ “Well, but,” 
says Mr. Hepworth Dixon, “a theory which has been ac- 
cepted by men like Judge Edmonds, Dr. Hare, Elder 
Frederick, and Professor Bush!” And again: ‘‘Such 
are, in brief, the bases of what Newman Weeks, Sarah 
Horton, Deborah Butler, and the associated brethren, 
proclaimed in Rolt’s Hall as the new covenant!” If he 


(A cere crn 


| 


Barbarians, Philistines, Populace 111 


was summing up an account of the doctrine of Plato, 
or of St. Paul, and of its followers, Mr. Hepworth Dixon 
could not be more earnestly reverential. But the ques- 
tion is, Have personages like Judge Edmonds, and New- 
man Weeks, and Elderess Polly, and Elderess Antoinette, 
and the rest of Mr. Hepworth Dixon’s heroes and heroines, 
anything of the weight and significance for the best rea- 
son and spirit of man that Plato and St. Paul have? 
Evidently they, at present, have not; and a very small 
taste of them and their doctrines ought to have con- 
vinced Mr. Hepworth Dixon that they never could have. 
“But,” says he, “the magnetic power which Shakerism 
is exercising on American thought would of itself compel 
us,’—and so on. Now, so far as real thought is con- 
cerned,—thought which affects the best reason and spirit 
of man, the scientific or the imaginative thought of the 
world, the only thought which deserves speaking of in 
this solemn way,—America has up to the present . time 
been hardly’ more than a province of England, and even 
now would not herself claim to be more than abreast 
of England; and of this only real human thought, Eng- 
lish thought itself is not just now, as we must all admit, 
the most significant factor. »Neither, then, can Ameri- 
can thought be; and the magnetic power which Shakerism 
exercises on American thought is about as important, 
for the best reason and spirit of man, as the magnetic 
power which Mr. Murphy exercises on Birmingham 
Protestantism. And as we shall never get rid of our 


natural taste for the bathos in religion,—never get access 
“to a best self and right reason which may stand as a 


serious authority,—by treating Mr. Murphy as his own 
disciples treat him, seriously, and as if he was as much 
an authority as any one else: so we shall never get rid 
of it while our able and popular writers treat their Joe 


112 Culture and Anarchy 


Smiths and Deborah Butlers, with their so many thou- 
sand souls and so many thousand rifles, in the like ex- 
aggerated and misleading manner, and so do their best 
to confirm us in a bad mental habit to which we are al- 
ready too prone. 

/ If our habits make it hard for us to come at the idea 
of a high best self, of a paramount authority, in literature 


or religion, how much more do they make this hard in the 
sphere of politics! In other countries the governors, not 
\ depending so immediately on the favour of the governed, 


have everything to urge them, if they know anything of 
right reason (and it is at least supposed that governors 
should know more of this than the mass of the governed), 
to set it authoritatively before the community. But our 
whole scheme of government being representative, every 
one of our governors has all possible temptation, instead 
of setting up before the governed who elect him, and on 
whose favour he depends, a high standard of right reason, 
to accommodate himself as much as possible to their 
natural taste for the bathos; and even if he tries to go 
counter to it, to proceed in this with so much flattering 
and coaxing, that they shall not suspect their ignorance 
and prejudices to be anything very unlike right reason, or 
their natural taste for the bathos to differ much from a 
relish for the sublime. Every one is thus in every possible 
way encouraged to trust in his own heart; but, “he that 
trusteth in his own heart,” says the Wise Man, “‘is a fool;”” 
and at any rate this, which Bishop Wilson says, is undenia- 
bly true: “The number of those who need to be awakened 
is far greater than that of those who need comfort.” 
But in our political system everybody is comforted. 
Our guides and governors who have to be elected by the 
influence of the barbarians, and who depend on their 
favour, sing the praises of the Barbarians, and say all 


Barbarians, Philistines, Populace 113 


the smooth things that can be said of them. With Mr. 
Tennyson, they celebrate “‘the great broad-shouldered 
genial Englishman,” with his “sense of duty,” his ‘‘ rever- 
ence for the laws,” and his “patient force,’’ who saves 
us from the “revolts, republics, revolutions, most no 
graver than a schoolboy’s barring out,” which upset other 
and less broad-shouldered nations. Our guides who are 
chosen by the Philistines and who have to look to their 
favour, tell the Philistines how “all the world knows that 
the great middle class of this country. supplies the mind, 
the will, and the power requisite for all the great and good. 
things that have to be done,” and congratulate them on 
their “earnest good sense, which. penetrates through soph- 
isms, ignores commonplaces, and gives to conventional 
illusions their true value.” Our guides who look to the 
favour of the” Populace, tell them that “theirs are the 
brightest powers-of sympathy, and the readiest powers 
Siachonzug |)" 

Harsh things are said too, no doubt, against all the 
great classes of the community; but these things so 
evidently come from a hostile class, and are so mani- 
festly dictated by the passions and prepossessions of 
a hostile class, and not by right reason, that they make 
no serious impression on those at whom they are launched, 
but slide easily off their minds. For instance, when the 
Reform League orators inveigh against our cruel and 
bloated aristocracy, these invectives so evidently show 
the passions and point of view of the Populace, that they 
do not sink into the minds of those at whom they are 
addressed, or awaken any thought or self-examination in 
them. Again, when our aristocratical baronet describes 
the Philistines and the Populace as influenced with a kind 
of hideous mania for emasculating the aristocracy, that 
reproach so clearly comes from the wrath and excited 


i 
f 


f 
: 
\ 


114 Culture and Anarchy 


imagination of the Barbarians, that it does not much set 
the Philistines and the Populace thinking. Or when Mr. 
Lowe calls the Populace drunken and venal, he so ev-. 
idently calls them this in an agony of apprehension for his 
Philistine or middle-class Parliament, which has done so 
many great and heroic works, and is now threatened with 
mixture and debasement, that the populace do not lay his 


_words seriously to heart. 


So the voice which makes a permanent impression 
on each of our classes is the voice of its friends, and this 


\.1s from the nature of things, as I have said, a comforting 


voice. The Barbarians remain in the belief that the great 
broad-shouldered genial Englishman may be well satished 
with himself; the Philistines remain in the belief that the 
great middle class of this country, with its earnest common- 
sense penetrating through sophisms and ignoring common- 
places, may be well satisfied with itself; the Populace, that 
the working man with his bright powers of sympathy and 
ready powers of action, may be well satisfied with him- 
self. What hope, at this rate, of extinguishing the taste 
of the bathos implanted by nature itself in the soul of 
man, or of inculcating the belief that excellence dwells 
among high and steep rocks, and can only be reached by 
those who sweat blood to reach her? 

But it will be said, perhaps, that candidates for political 


influence and leadership, who thus caress the self-love 


of those whose suffrages they desire, know quite well that 
they are not saying the sheer truth as reason sees it, but 
that they are using a sort of conventional language, or 
what we call clap-trap, which is essential to the working 
of representative institutions And therefore, I suppose, 
we ought rather to say with Figaro: Qui est-ce qu’on 
trompe ici? Now, I admit that often, but not always, when ~ 
our governors say smooth things to the self-love of the 


Barbarians, Philistines, Populace 115 


class whose political support they want, they know very 
well that they are overstepping, by a long stride, the 
bounds of truth and soberness; and while they talk, they 
in a manner, no doubt, put their tongue in their cheek. 
Not always; because, when a Barbarian appeals to his 
own class to make him their representative and give him 
political power, he, when he pleases their self-love by 
extolling broad-shouldered genial Englishmen with their 
sense of duty, reverence for the laws, and patient force, 
pleases his own self-love and extols himself, and is, there- 
fore, himself ensnared by his own smooth words. And so, 
too, when a Philistine wants to be sent to Parliament by 
his brother Philistines, and extols the earnest good sense 
which characterises Manchester and ‘supplies the mind, 
the will, and the power, as the Daily News eloquently 
says, requisite for all the great and good things that 
have to be done, he intoxicates and deludes himself as 
well as his brother Philistines who hear him. 

But it is true that a Barbarian often wants the political 
support of the Philistines; and he unquestionably, when 
he flatters the self-love of Philistinism, and extols, in the 
approved fashion, its energy, enterprise, and self-reliance, 
knows that he is talking clap-trap, and so to say, puts his 
tongue in his cheek. On all matters where Nonconformity 
and its catch-words are concerned, this insincerity of 
Barbarians needing Nonconformist support, and, there- 
fore, flattering the self-love of Nonconformity and repeat- 
ing its catchwords without the least real belief in them, is 
very noticeable. When the Nonconformists, in a transport 
of blind zeal, threw out Sir James Graham’s useful Educa- 
tion Clauses in 1843, one-half of their Parliamentary 
advocates, no doubt, who cried aloud against “‘trampling 
on the religious liberty of the Dissenters by taking the 
money of Dissenters to teach the tenets of the Church of 


116 Culture and Anarchy 


England,” put their tongue in their cheek while they so 
cried out. And perhaps there is even a sort of motion of 
Mr. Frederic Harrison’s tongue towards his cheek when 
he talks of “the shriek of superstition,” and tells the 
working class that “theirs are the brightest powers of 
sympathy and the readiest powers of action.” But the 
point on which I would insist is, that this involuntary 
tribute to truth and soberness on the part of certain of our 
governors and guides never reaches at all the mass of 
us governed, to serve as a lesson to us, to abate our self- 
love, and to awaken in us a suspicion that our favourite 
prejudices may be, to a higher reason, all nonsense. What- 
ever by-play goes on ooieal the more intelligent of our. 
not only in our own eyes, jee in the eyes of our representa 
tive and ruling men, there is nothing more admirable than 
our ordinary self, whatever our ordinary self happens | tou 
be, Barbarian, Philistine, or Populace. | ra 
Thus everything in our political life tends to hide from 
us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves, 
and to prevent our getting the notion of a paramount 
right reason. Royalty itself, in its idea the expression of 
the collective nation, and a sort of constituted witness to 
its best mind, we try to turn into a kind of grand advertis 
ing van, meant to give publicity and credit to the inven- | 
tions, sound or unsound, of the ordinary self of individuals. 
I remember, when I was in North Germany, having 
this very strongly brought to my mind in the matter 
of schools and their institution. In Prussia, the best 
schools are Crown patronage schools, as they are called; 
schools which have been established and endowed (and 
new ones are to this day being established and endowed) 
by the Sovereign himself out of his own revenues, to be 
under the direct control and management of him or of 


Barbarians, Philistines, Populace 117 


those representing him, and to serve as types of what 
schools should be. The Sovereign, as his position raises 
him above many prejudices and littlenesses, and as he can 
always have at his disposal the best advice, has evident 
advantages over private founders in well planning and 
directing a school; while at the same time his great means 
and his great influence secure, to a well-planned school 
of his, credit and authority. This is what, in North 
Germany, the governors do in the matter of education for 
the governed; and one may say that they thus give the 
governed a lesson, and draw out in them the idea of a 
right reason higher than the suggestions of an ordinary 
man’s ordinary self. 

But in England how different is the part which in 
this matter our governors are accustomed to play! The 
Licensed Victuallers or the Commercial Travellers propose 
to make a school for their children; and I suppose, in the 
matter of schools, one may call the Licensed Victuallers 
or the Commercial Travellers ordinary men, with their 
natural taste for the bathos still strong; and a Sovereign 
with the advice of men like Wilhelm von Humboldt or 
Schleiermacher may, in this matter, be a better judge, and 
nearer to right reason. And it will be allowed, probably, 
that right reason would suggest that, to have a sheer 
school of Licensed Victuallers’ children, or a sheer school of 
Commercial Travellers’ children, and to bring them all 
up, not only at home but at school too, in a kind of odour 
of licensed victualism or of bagmanism, is not a wise 
training to give to these children. And in Germany, I 
have said, the action of the national guides or governors 
is to suggest and provide a better. But, in England, the 
action of the national guides or governors is, for a Royal 
Prince or a great Minister to go down to the opening of 
the Licensed Victuallers’ or of the Commercial Travellers’ 


118 Culture and Anarchy 


school, to take the chair, to extol the energy and self- 
reliance of the Licensed Victuallers or the Commercial 
Travellers, to be all of their way of thinking, to predict 
full success to their schools, and never so much as to hint 
to them that they are probably doing a very foolish thing, 
and that the right way to go to work with their children’s 
education is quite different. And it is the same in almost 
every department of affairs. While, on the Continent, the 
idea prevails that it is the business of the heads and repre- 
sentatives of the nation, by virtue of their superior means, 
power, and information, to set an example and to provide 
suggestions of right reason, among us the idea is that the 
business of the heads and representatives of the nation 
is to do nothing of the kind, but to applaud the natural 
taste for the bathos showing itself vigorously in any part 
of the community, and to encourage its works. 

Now I do not say that the political system of foreign 
countries has not inconveniences which may outweigh the 
inconveniences of our own political system; nor am [| the 
least proposing to get rid of our own political system and 
to adopt theirs. But a sound centre of authority being 
what, in this disquisition, we have been led to seek, a) 
right reason, or our best self, appearing alone to offer 
‘such a sound centre of authority, it is necessary to take 
note of the chief impediments which hinder, in this 
country, the extrication or recognition of this right reason 
as a paramount authority, with a view to afterwards try- 
ing in what way they can best be removed. 

This being borne in mind, I proceed to remark how 
not only do we get no suggestions of right reason, and no 
rebukes of our ordinary self, from our governors, but a 
kind of philosophical theory is widely spread among us to 
the effect that there is no such thing at all as a best self and 
a right reason having claim to paramount authority, or, 







Barbarians, Philistines, Populace 119 


at any rate, no such thing ascertainable and capable of 
being made use of; and that there 1s nothing but an infinite 

number of ideas and works of our ordinary selves, and sug- 

gestions of our natural taste for the bathos, pretty nearly 

equal in value, which are doomed either to an irreconcil- 

able conflict, or else to a perpetual give and take; and that 

wisdom consists in choosing the give and take rather than | 
the conflict, and in sticking to our choice with patience 

and good humour. 

And, on the other hand, we have another philosophical 
theory rife among us, to the effect that without the labour 
of perverting ourselves by custom or example to relish 
right reason, but by continuing all of us to follow freely 
our natural taste for the bathos, we shall, by the mercy 
_of Providence, and by a kind of natural tendency of things, 
come in due time to relish and follow right reason. 

The great promoters of these philosophical theories 
are our newspapers, which, no less than our Parliamentary 
representatives, may be said to act the part of guides and 
governors to us; and these favourite doctrines of theirs I 
call,—or should call, if the doctrines were not preached 
by authorities I so much respect,—the first, a peculiarly 
British form of Atheism, the second, a peculiarly British 
form of Quietism. The first-maned melancholy doctrine 
is preached in the Times with great clearness and force 
of style; indeed, it is well known, from the example of the 
poet Lucretius and others, what great masters of style 
the atheistic doctrine has always counted among its 
promulgators. ‘‘It is of no use,” says the Times, “for us 
to attempt to force upon our neighbours our several likings 
and dislikings. We must take things as they are. Every- 
body has his own little vision of religious or civil perfection. 
Under the evident impossibility of satisfying everybody, 
we agree to take our stand on equal laws and on a system 


120 Culture and Anarchy 


as open and liberal as is possible. The result is that every. 
body has more liberty of action and of speaking here than 
anywhere else in the Old World.” We come again here 
upon Mr. Roebuck’s celebrated definition of happiness, 
on which I have so often commented: ‘I look around me 
and ask what is the state of England? Is not every man 
able to say what he likes? I ask you whether the world 
over, or in past history, there is anything like it? Nothing. 
I pray that our unrivalled happiness may last.” This is 
the old story of our system of checks and every English- 
man doing as he likes, which we have already seen to 
have been convenient enough so long as there were 
only the Barbarians and the Philistines to do what 
they liked, but to be getting inconvenient, and productive 
of anarchy, now that the Populace wants to do what it 
likes too. 

But for all that, I will not at once dismiss this famous 
doctrine, but will first quote another passage from the 
Times, applying the doctrine to a matter of which we have 
just been speaking,—education. ‘‘The difficulty here” 
(in providing a national system of education), says the 
Times, “‘does not reside in any removable arrangements. 
It is inherent and native in the actual and inveterate 
state of things in this country. All these powers and 
personages, all these conflicting influences and varieties 
of character, exist, and have long existed among us; they 
are fighting it out, and will long continue to fight it out, 
without coming to that happy consummation when some 
one element of the British character is to destroy or to 
absorb all the rest.” There it is! the various promptings 
of the natural taste for the bathos in this man and that 
amongst us are fighting it out; and the day will never come 
(and, indeed, why should we wish it to come?) when one 
man’s particular sort of taste for the bathos shall tyrannise 


Barbarians, Philistines, Populace 121 


over another man’s; nor when right reason (if that may be 
called an element of the British character) shall absorb 
and rule them all. ‘‘The whole system of this country, 
like the constitution we boast to inherit, and are glad to 
uphold, is made up of established facts, prescriptive au- 
thorities, existing usages, powers that be, persons in pos- 
session, and communities or classes that have won do- 
minion for themselves, and will hold it against all comers.” 
Every force in the world, evidently, except the one rec- 
onciling force, right reason! Barbarian here, Philistine 
there, Mr. Bradlaugh and Populace striking in!—pull 
devil, pull baker! Really, presented with the mastery of 
style of our leading journal, the sad picture, as one gazes 
upon it, assumes the iron and inexorable solemnity of 
tragic Destiny. 

After this, the milder doctrine of our other philosophical 
teacher, the Daily News, has, at first, something very 
attractive and assuaging. The Daily News begins, indeed, 
in appearance, to weave the iron web of necessity round 

pus like the Times. ‘The alternative is between a man’s 
| doing what he likes and his doing what some one else, 
probably not one whit wiser than himself, likes.” This 
points to the tacit compact, mentioned in my last paper, 
between the Barbarians and the Philistines, and into which 
it is hoped that the Populace will one day enter; the 
compact, so creditable to English honesty, that since each 
class has only the ideas and aims of its ordinary self to 
give effect to, none of them shall, if it exercise power, treat 
its ordinary self too seriously, or attempt to impose it on 
others; but shall let these others,—the fanatical Protestant, 
for instance, in his Papist-baiting, and the popular tribune 
in his Hyde Park anarchy-mongering,—have their fling. 
But then the Daily News suddenly lights up the gloom of 
necessitarianism with bright beams of hope. ‘‘No doubt,” 


122 Culture and Anarchy 


it says, ‘“‘the common reason of society ought to check the 
aberrations of individual eccentricity.” This common 
reason of society looks very like our best self or right 
reason, to which we want to give authority, by making 
the action of the State, or nation in its collective character, 
the expression of it. But of this project of ours, the Dazly 
News, with its subtle dialectics, makes havoc. “‘Make the 
State the organ of the common reason?’’—it says. ‘“‘You 
make it the organ of something or other, but how can you 
be certain that reason will be the quality which will be em- 
bodied in it?”’ You cannot be certain of it, undoubtedly, if 
you never try to bring the thing about; but the question 
is, the action of the State being the action of the collective 
nation, and the action of the collective nation carrying 
naturally great publicity, weight, and force of example 
_ with it, whether we should not try to put into the action 

of the State as much as possible of right reason or our best 
self, which may, in this manner, come back to us with new 
force and authority; may have visibility, form, and 
influence; and help to confirm us, in the many moments 
when we are tempted to be our ordinary selves merely, 
in resisting our natural taste of the bathos rather than 
in giving way to it? 

But no! says our teacher: “‘It is better there should 
be an infinite variety of experiments in human action; 
the common reason of society will in the main check the 
aberrations of individual eccentricity well enough, if left 
to its natural operation.” This is what I call the specially 
British form of Quietism, or a devout, but excessive 
reliance on an over-ruling Providence. Providence, as the 
moralists are careful to tell us, generally works in human 
affairs by human means; so, when we want to make right 
reason act on individual inclination, our best self on our 
ordinary self, we seek to give it more power of doing so by 


Barbarians, Philistines, Populace 123 


giving it public recognition and authority, and embody- 
ing it, so far as we can, in the State. It seems too much 
to ask of Providence, that while we, on our part, leave 
our congenital taste for the bathos to its natural operation 
and its infinite variety of experiments, Providence should 
mysteriously guide it into the true track, and compel it 
to relish the sublime. At any rate, great men and great 
institutions have hitherto seemed necessary for producing 
any considerable effect of this kind. No doubt we have 
an infinite variety of experiments and an ever-multiplying 
multitude of explorers. Even in these few chapters I 
have enumerated many: the British Banner, Judge Ed- 
monds, Newman Weeks, Deborah Butler, Elderess Polly, 
Brother Noyes, Mr. Murphy, the Licensed Victuallers, the 
Commercial Travellers, and I know not how many more; 
and the members of the noble army are swelling every 
day. But what a depth of Quietism, or rather, what an 
over-bold call on the direct interposition of Providence, 
to believe that these interesting explorers will discover the 
true track, or at any rate, “will do so in the main well 
enough” (whatever that may mean) if left to their natural 
operation; that is, by going on as they are! Philosophers 
say, indeed, that we learn virtue by performing acts of 
virtue; but to say that we shall learn virtue by performing 
any acts to which our natural taste for the bathos carries 
us, that the fanatical Protestant comes at his best self 
by Papist-baiting, or Newman Weeks and Deborah Butler 
at right reason by following their noses, this certainly 
does appear over-sanguine. 

It is true, what we want is to make right reason act 
on individual reason, the reason of individuals; all our 
search for authority has that for its end and aim. The 
Daily News says, I observe, that all my argument for 
authority “‘has a non-intellectual root;” and from what 


124 Culture and Anarchy 


I know of my own mind and its poverty I think this so 
probable, that I should be inclined easily to admit it, 
if it were not that, in the first place, nothing of this kind, 
perhaps, should be admitted without examination; and, 
in the second, a way of accounting for the charge being 
made, in this particular instance, without good grounds, 
appears to present itself. What seems to me to account 
here, perhaps, for the charge, is the want of flexibility 
of our race, on which I have so often remarked. I mean, 
it being admitted that the conformity of the individual 
reason of the fanatical Protestant or the popular rioter 
with right reason is our true object, and not the mere 
restraining them, by the strong arm of the State, from 
Papist-baiting, or railing-breaking,—admitting this, we 
English have so little flexibility that we cannot readily 
perceive that the State’s restraining them from these 
indulgences may yet fix clearly in their minds that, to 
the collective nation, these indulgences appear irrational 
and unallowable, may make them pause and reflect, and 
may contribute to bringing, with time, their individual 
reason into harmony with right reason. But in no country, 
owing to the want of intellectual flexibility above men- 
tioned, is the leaning which is our natural one, and, there- 
fore, needs no recommending to us, so sedulously recom- 
mended, and the leaning which is not our natural one, 
and, therefore, does not need dispraising to us, so sedu- 
lously dispraised, as in ours. To rely on the individual 
being, with us, the natural leaning, we will hear of nothing 
but the good of relying on the individual; to act through 
the collective nation on the individual being not our 
natural leaning, we will hear nothing in recommendation 
of it. But the wise know that we often need to hear 
most of that to which we are least inclined, and even 


Barbarians, Philistines, Populace 125 


to learn to employ, in certain circumstances, that which 
is capable, if employed amiss, of being a danger to us. 
Elsewhere this is certainly better understood than here. 

In a recent number of the Westminster Review, an able 
writer, but with precisely our national want of flexibility 
of which I have been speaking, has unearthed, I see, for 
our present needs, an English translation, published some 
years ago, of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s book, The Sphere 
and Duties of Government. Humboldt’s object in this 
book is to show that the operation of government ought 
to be severely limited to what directly and immediately 
relates to the security of person and property. Wilhelm 
von Humboldt, one of the most beautiful souls that have 
ever existed, used to say that one’s business in life was 
first to perfect one’s self by all the means in one’s power, 
and secondly, to try and create in the world around one 
an aristocracy, the most numerous that one _ possibly 
could, of talents and characters. He saw, of course, 

, that, in the end, everything comes to this,—that the in- 

, ( dividual must act for himself, and must be perfect in 
\ himself; and he lived in a country, Germany, where 
\* people were disposed to act too little for themselves, and 
_ to rely too much on the Government. But even thus, 
, such was his flexibility, so little was he in bondage to a 
mere abstract maxim, that he saw very well that for his 
purpose itself, of enabling the individual to stand perfect 
on his own foundations and to do without the State, the 
action of the State would for long, long years be necessary. 
And soon after he wrote his book on The Sphere and 
Duties of Government, Wilhelm von Humboldt became 
Minister of Education in Prussia; and from his ministry 
all the great reforms which give the control of Prussian 
education to the State,—the transference of the man- 
agement of public schools from their old boards of trus- 


126 . Culture and Anarchy 


tees to the State, the obligatory State-examination for 
schoolmasters, and the foundation of the great State- 
University of Berlin,—take their origin. This his Eng- 
lish reviewer says not a word of. But, writing for a 
people whose dangers lie, as we have seen, on the side 
of their unchecked and unguided individual action, whose 
dangers none of them lie on the side of an over-reliance 
on the State, he quotes just so much of Wilhelm von 
Humboldt’s example as can flatter them in their pro- 
pensities, and do them no good; and just what might 
make them think, and be of use to them, he leaves on 
one side. This precisely recalls the manner, it will be 
observed, in which we have seen that our royal and noble 
personages proceed with the Licensed Victuallers. 

In France the action of the State on individuals is 
yet more preponderant than in Germany; and the need 
which friends of human perfection feel for what may 
enable the individual to stand perfect on his own founda- 
tions is all the stronger. But what says one of the staunch- 
est of these friends, M. Renan, on State action; and 
even State action in that very sphere where in France 
it is most excessive, the sphere of education? Here are 
his words:—‘‘A Liberal believes in liberty, and liberty 

_ signifies the non-intervention of the State. But such an 
ideal 1s still a long way off from us, and the very means to 
| remove tt to an indefinite distance would be precisely the 
\State’s withdrawing its action too soon.” And this, he 
adds, is even truer of education than of any other depart- 
ment of public affairs. 
¢ We see, then, how indispensable to that human per- 
' fection which we seek is, in the opinion of good judges, 
some public recognition and establishment of our best 
self, or right reason. We see how our habits and prac- 
‘tice oppose themselves to such a recognition, and the 


Barbarians, Philistines, Populace 127 


many inconveniences which we therefore suffer. But 
now let us try to go a little deeper, and to find, beneath 
our actual habits and practice, the very ground and 
cause out of which they spring. 


| 


CHAPTER IV 
HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM 


Tuts fundamental ground is our preference of doing | to 
thinking. Now this preference 1 is a main element in our 
nature, and as we study it we find ourselves opening up 
a number of large questions on every side. 

Let me go back for a moment to Bishop Wilson, who 
says: “First, never go against the best light you have; 
secondly, take care that your light be not darkness.” 
We show, as a nation, laudable energy and persistence 
in walking according to the best light we have, but are 
not quite careful enough, perhaps, to see that our light 
be not darkness. This is only another version of the old 
story that energy is our strong point and favourable 
characteristic, rather than intelligence. But we may give 
to this idea a more general form still, in which it will 
have a yet larger range of application. We may regard 
this energy driving at practice, this paramount sense of 


the obligation of duty, self-control, and work, this ear- 
‘“mestness in going manfully with the best light we have, 
\as one force. And we may regard the intelligence driving 


at those ideas which are, after all, the basis of right prac- 
/ tice, the ardent sense for all the new and changing com- 
binations of them which man’s development brings with 


_it, the indomitable impulse to know and adjust them 
\perfectly, as another force. And these two forces we may 


regard as in some sense rivals,—rivals not by the necessity 

of their own nature, but as exhibited in man and his 

history,—and rivals dividing the empire of the world 

between them. And to give these forces names from the 

two races of men who have supplied the most signal and 
128 


Hebraism and Hellenism 129 


splendid manifestations of them, we may call them re- 
spectively the forces of Hebraism and Hellenism. He- 
braism and Hellenism,—between these two points of 
influence moves our world. At one time it feels more 
powerfully the attraction of one of them, at another time 
of the other; and it ought to be, though it never is, evenly 
and happily balanced between them. 

The final aim of both Hellenism and Hebraism, as of 
all great spiritual disciplines, is no doubt the same: man’s 
perfection or salvation. ‘The very language which they 
both of them use in schooling us to reach this aim is often 
identical. Even when their language indicates by varia- 
tion,—sometimes a broad variation, often a but slight 
and subtle variation,—the different courses of thought 
which are uppermost in each discipline, even then the 
unity of the final end and aim is still apparent. To em- 
ploy the actual words of that discipline with which we 
ourselves are all of us most familiar, and the words of 
which, therefore, come most home to us, that final end 
and aim is “‘that we might be partakers of the divine 
nature.” ‘These are the words of a Hebrew apostle, but of 
Hellenism and Hebraism alike this is, I say, the aim. 
When the two are confronted, as they very often are 
confronted, it is nearly always with what I may call a 
rhetorical purpose; the speaker’s whole design is to exalt 
and enthrone one of the two, and he uses the other only as 


, a foil and to enable him the better to give effect to his 


| 


purpose. Obviously, with us, it is usually Hellenism 
which is thus reduced to minister to the triumph of He- 
braism. There is a sermon on Greece and the Greek 


\ spirit by a man never to be mentioned without interest 


and respect, Frederick Robertson, in which this rhetorical 
use of Greece and the Greek spirit, and the inadequate 
exhibition of them necessarily consequent upon this, is 


130 Culture and Anarchy 


almost ludicrous, and would be censurable if it were not 
to be explained by the exigencies of a sermon. On the 
other hand, Heinrich Heine, and other writers of his sort, 
give us the spectacle of the tables completely turned, 
and of Hebraism brought in just as a foil and contrast 
to Hellenism, and to make the superiority of Hellenism 
more manifest. In both these cases there is injustice 
and misrepresentation. The aim and end of both He- 
braism and Hellenism is, as I have said, one and the 
same, and this aim and end is august and admirable. 
Still, they pursue this aim by very different courses. 
The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as 


they_ really_are;. the uppermost.idea with. Hebraism 1s 


conduct and obedience. Nothing can do away with this 
“ineffaceable difference. The Greek quarrel with the body 
| and its desires is, that they hinder right thinking; the 
Hebrew. quarrel. with .them.1s,;~that..they hinder_right 
acting. “He that keepeth the law, happy is he;”’ “ Blessed 
is the man that feareth the Eternal, that delighteth 
greatly in his commandments;’’—that is the Hebrew no- 
tion of felicity; and, pursued with passion and tenacity, 
this notion would not let the Hebrew rest till, as is well 
known, he had at last got out of the law a network of 
prescriptions to enwrap his whole life, to govern every 
moment of it, every impulse, every action. The Greek 
notion of felicity, on the other hand, is perfectly conveyed 
in these words of a great French moralist: “C’est le bon- 
heur des hommes,’’—when? when they abhor that which 
is evilf—no; when they exercise themselves in the law 
of the Lord day and night?’—no; when they die daily?— 
no; when they walk about the New Jerusalem with palms 
in their handsf—no; but when they think aright, when 
their thought hits: “‘guand ils pensent juste.’ At the 
bottom of both the Greek and the Hebrew notion is the 


% 


Hebraism and Hellenism 131 


desire, native in man, for reason and the will of God, the 
feeling after the universal order,—in a word, the love 
of God. But, while Hebraism seizes upon certain plain, 
capital intimations of the universal order, and rivets 
itself, one may say, with unequalled grandeur of earnest- 
ness and intensity on the study and observance of them, 
the bent of Hellenism is to follow, with flexible activity, 
the whole play of the universal order, to be apprehensive 
of missing any part of it, of sacrificing one part to another, 
to slip away from resting in this or that intimation of 
it, however capital. An unclouded clearness of mind, 
an unimpeded play of thought, is what this bent drives 
at. The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of 
consciousness; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience. 

Christianity changed nothing in this essential bent ty 
Hebraism to set doing above knowing. Self-conquest, 
self-devotion, the following not our own individual will, 
but the will of God, obedience, is the fundamental idea of 
this form, also, of the discipline to which we have attached 
the general name of Hebraism. Only, as the old law and 
the network of prescriptions with which it enveloped 
human life were evidently a motive-power not driving 
and searching enough to produce the result aimed at, 
—patient continuance in well-doing, self-conquest,— 
Christianity substituted for them boundless devotion to 
that inspiring and affecting pattern of self-conquest offered 
by Jesus Christ; and by the new motive-power, of which 
tiie essence was this, though the love and admiration of 
Christian churches have for centuries been employed in 
varying, amplifying, and adoring the plain description 
of it, Christianity, as St. Paul truly says, “establishes the 
law,” and in the strength of the ampler power which she 
has thus supplied to fulfil it, has accomplished the miracles, 
which we all see, of her history. 


132 Culture and Anarchy 


So long as we do not forget that both Hellenism and 
Hebraism are profound and admirable manifestations of 
man’s life, tendencies, and powers, and that both of them 
aim at a like final result, we can hardly insist too strongly 
on the divergence of line and of operation with which they 
proceed. It is a divergence so great that it most truly, 
as the prophet Zechariah says, “has raised up thy sons, O 
Zion, against thy sons,O Greece!”’ The difference whether 
it is by doing or by knowing that we set most store, and 
the practical consequences which follow from this dif- 
ference, leave their mark on all the history of our race and 
of its development. Language may be abundantly quoted 
from both Hellenism and Hebraism to make it seem that 
one follows the same current as the other towards the same 
goal. They are, truly, borne towards the same goal; but 
the currents which bear them are infinitely different. It 
is true, Solomon will praise knowing: “Understanding 
is a well-spring of life unto him that hath it.”” And in the 
New Testament, again, Jesus Christ is a “‘light,”’ and 
“truth makes us free.” It is true, Aristotle will under- 
value knowing: “In what concerns virtue,’ says he, 
“three things are necessary—knowledge, deliberate will 
and perseverance; but, whereas the two last are all-im- 
portant, the first is a matter of little importance.” It is 
true that with the same impatience with which St. James 
enjoins a man to be not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the 
work, Epictetus exhorts us to do what we have demon- 
strated to ourselves we ought to do; or he taunts us with 
futility, for being armed at all points to prove that lying 
is wrong, yet all the time continuing to lie. It is true Plato, 
in words which are almost the words of the New Testament 
or the Imitation, calls life a learning to die. But under- 
neath the superficial agreement the fundamental diver- 
gence still subsists. The understanding of Solomon is 


Hebraism and Hellenism 133 


“the walking in the way of the commandments;” this is 
“the way of peace,” and it is of this that blessedness 
comes. In the New Testament, the truth which gives us 
the peace of God and makes us free, is the love of Christ 
constraining us to crucify, as he did, and with a like pur- 
pose of moral regeneration, the flesh with its affections and 
lusts, and thus establishing, as we have seen, the law. 
The moral virtues, on the other hand, are with Aristotle 
but the ‘porch and access to the intellectual, and with 
these last is blessedness. That partaking of the divine 
life, which both Hellenism and Hebraism, as we have said, 
fix as their crowning aim, Plato expressly denies to the man 
of practical virtue merely, of self-conquest with any other 
motive than that of perfect intellectual vision. He re- 
serves it for the lover of pure knowledge, of seeing things 
as they really are,—the @tAopays. 

Both Hellenism and Hebraism arise out of the wants 
of human nature, and address themselves to satisfying 
those wants. But their methods are so different, they lay 
stress on such different points, and call into being by their 
respective disciplines such different activities, that the 
face which human nature presents when it passes from 
the hands of one of them to those of the other, is no longer 
the same. To get rid of one’s ignorance, to see things as 
they are, and by seeing them as they are to see them in 
their beauty, is the simple and attractive ideal which 
Hellenism holds out before human nature; and from the 
simplicity and charm of this ideal, Hellenism, and human 
life in the hands of Hellenism, is invested with a kind of 
aérial ease, clearness, and radiancy; they are full of what 
we call sweetness and light. Difficulties are kept out of 
view, and the beauty and rationalness of the ideal have 
all our thoughts. ‘“‘The best man is he who most tries to ' 
perfect himself, and the happiest man is he who most feels — 


134 Culture and Anarchy 


that he zs perfecting himself,”—this account of the matter 
“by Socrates, the true Socrates of the Memorabilia, has 
something so simple, spontaneous, and unsophisticated 
about it, that it seems to fill us with clearness and hope 
when we hear it. But there is a saying which | have heard 
attributed to Mr. Carlyle about Socrates,—a very happy 
saying, whether it is really Mr. Carlyle’s or not,—which 
excellently marks the essential point in which Hebraism 
differs from Hellenism. “Socrates,” this saying goes, 
““is terribly at ease in Zion.” Hebraism,—and here is the 
source of its wonderful strength,—has always been severely 
preoccupied with an awful sense of the impossibility of 
being at ease in Zion; of the difficulties which oppose them- 
selves to man’s pursuit or attainment of that perfection 
of which Socrates talks so hopefully, and, as from this 
point of view one might almost say, so glibly. It is all 
very well to talk of getting rid of one’s ignorance, of seeing 
things in their reality, seeing them in their beauty; but how 
/is this to be done when there is something which thwarts 
' and spoils all our efforts? 
This something is sin; and the space which sin fills in 
\Hebraism, as compared with Hellenism, is indeed pro- 
digious. This obstacle to perfection fills the whole scene, 
and perfection appears remote and rising away from earth, 
in the background. Under the name of sin, the difficulties 
of knowing oneself and conquering oneself which impede 
man’s passage to perfection, become, for Hebraism, a 
positive, active entity hostile to man, a mysterious power 
which I heard Dr. Pusey the other day, in one of his im-| 
pressive sermons, compare to a hideous hunchback seated| 
on our shoulders, and which it is the main business of our’ 
lives to hate and oppose. The discipline of the Old Testa- 
ment may be summed up as a discipline teaching us to 
abhor and flee from sin; the discipline of the New Testa- 


Hebraism and Hellenism 135 


ment, as a discipline teaching us to die to it. As Hellenism 
speaks of thinking clearly, seeing things in their essence 
and beauty, as a grand and precious feat for man to 
achieve, so Hebraism speaks of becoming conscious of sin, 
of wakening to a sense of sin, as a feat of this kind. It is 
obvious to what wide divergence these differing tendencies, 
actively followed, must lead. As one passes and repasses 
from Hellenism to Hebraism, from Plato to St. Paul, one 
feels inclined to rub one’s eyes and ask oneself whether 
man is indeed a gentle and simple being, showing the 
traces of a noble and divine nature; or an unhappy chained 
captive, labouring with groanings that cannot be uttered 
to free himself from the body of this death. 

Apparently it was the Hellenic conception of human 
nature which was unsound, for the world could not live 
by it. Absolutely to call it unsound, however, is to fall 
into the common error of its Hebraising enemies; but it 
was unsound at that particular moment of man’s develop- 
ment, it was premature. ‘The indispensable basis of 
conduct and self-control, the platform upon which alone 
the perfection aimed at by Greece can come into bloom, 
was not to be reached by our race so easily; centuries of 
probation and discipline were needed to bring us to it. 
Therefore the bright promise of Hellenism faded, and 
Hebraism ruled the world. Then was seen that astonish- 
ing spectacle, so well marked by the often-quoted words 
of the prophet Zechariah, when men of all languages and 
nations took hold of the skirt of him that was a Jew, say- 
ing:—“We will go with you, for we have heard that God 1s 
with you.’ And the Hebraism which thus received and 
ruled a world all gone out of the way and altogether become 
unprofitable, was, and could not but be, the later, the 
more spiritual, the more attractive development of Hebra- 
ism. It was Christianity; that is to say, Hebraism aiming 


136 Culture and Anarchy 


at self-conquest and rescue from the thrall of vile affec- 
tions, not by obedience to the letter of a law, but by 
conformity to the image of a self-sacrificing example. To 
a world stricken with moral enervation Christianity 
offered its spectacle of an inspired self-sacrifice; to men 
who refused themselves nothing, it showed one who re- 
fused himself everything;—‘‘my Saviour banished joy!” 
says George Herbert. When the alma Venus, the life- 
giving and joy-giving power of nature, so fondly cherished 
by the Pagan world, could not save her followers from 
self-dissatisfaction and ennui, the severe words of the 
apostle came bracingly and refreshingly: “‘Let no man 
deceive you with vain words, for because of these things 
cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedi- 
ence.” Through age after age and generation after genera- 
tion, our race, or all that part of our race which was most 
living and progressive, was baptized into a death; and 
endeavoured, by suffering in the flesh, to cease from sin. 
Of this endeavour, the animating labours and afflictions 
of early Christianity, the touching asceticism of medieval 
Christianity, are the great historical manifestations. 
Literary monuments of it, each in its own way incompa- 
rable, remain in the Epistles of St. Paul, in St. Augustine’s 
Confessions, and in the two original and simplest books 
of the Imitation.? 

Of two disciplines laying their main stress, the one, on 
clear intelligence, the other, on firm obedience; the one, 
on comprehensively knowing the grounds of one’s duty, 
the other, on diligently practising it; the one, on taking 
fall possible care (to use Bishop Wilson’s words again) that 
‘the light we have be not darkness, the other, that accord- 
ing to the best light we have we diligently walk,—the 
‘priority naturally belongs to that discipline which braces 


1 The two first books. 


Hebraism and Hellenism 137 


all man’s moral powers, and founds for him an indis- 
pensable basis of character. And, therefore, it is justly 
said of the Jewish people, who were charged with setting 
powerfully forth that side of the divine order to which 
the words conscience and self-conquest point, that they were 
“entrusted with the oracles of God;” as it is justly said of 
Christianity, which followed Judaism and which set forth 
this side with a much deeper effectiveness and a much 
wider influence, that the wisdom of the old Pagan world 
was foolishness compared to it. No words of devotion 
and admiration can be too strong to render thanks to 
these beneficent forces which have so borne forward 
humanity in its appointed work of coming to the knowledge 
and possession of itself; above all, in those great moments 
when their action was the wholesomest and the most 
necessary. 

But the evolution of these forces, separately and in 
themselves, 1s not the whole evolution of humanity,— 
their single history is not the whole history of man; whereas 
their admirers are always apt to make it stand for the 
whole history. Hebraism and Hellenism are, neither of 
them, the Jaw of human development, as their admirers 
are prone to make them; they are, each of them, contribu- 
tions to human development,—august contributions, 
invaluable contributions; and each showing itself to us 
more august, more invaluable, more preponderant over 
the other, according to the moment in which we take them, 
and the relation in which we stand to them. The nations 
of our modern world, children of that immense and sal- 
utary movement which broke up the Pagan world, 
inevitably stand to Hellenism in a relation which dwarfs 
it, and to Hebraism in a relation which magnifies it. They 
are inevitably prone to take Hebraism as the law of human 
development, and not as simply a contribution to it, how- 


138 Culture and Anarchy 


ever precious. And yet the lesson must perforce be 
learned, that the human spirit is wider than the most 
priceless of the forces which bear it onward, and that to 
the whole development of man Hebraism itself is, like 
Hellenism, but a contribution. 

Perhaps we may help ourselves to see this clearer 
by an illustration drawn from the treatment of a single 
great idea which has profoundly engaged the human spirit, 
and has given it eminent opportunities for showing its 
nobleness and energy. It surely must be perceived that 
the idea of immortality, as this idea rises in its generality 
before the human spirit, is something grander, truer, 
and more satisfying, than it is in the particular forms by 
which St. Paul, in the famous fifteenth chapter of the 
Epistle to the Corinthians, and Plato, in the Phedo, 
endeavour to develop and establish it. Surely we cannot 
but feel, that the argumentation with which the Hebrew 
apostle goes about to expound this great idea is, after 
all, confused and inconclusive; and that the reasoning, 
drawn from analogies of likeness and equality, which is 
employed upon it by the Greek philosopher, is over-subtle 
and sterile. Above and beyond the inadequate solutions 
which Hebraism and Hellenism here attempt, extends 
the immense and august problem itself, and the human 
spirit which gave birth to it. And this single illustration 
may suggest to us how the same thing happens in other 
cases also. 

But meanwhile, by alternations of Hebraism and 
Hellenism, of a man’s intellectual and moral impulses, 
of the effort to see things as they really are, and the 
effort to win peace by self-conquest, the human spirit 
proceeds; and each of these two forces has its appointed 
hours of culmination and seasons of rule. As the great 
movement of Christianity was a triumph of Hebraism and 


Hebraism and Hellenism 139 


man’s moral impulses, so the great movement which goes 
by the name of the Renascence! was an uprising and re- 
instatement of man’s intellectual impulses and of Hellen- 
ism. We in England, the devoted children of Protestant- 
ism, chiefly know the Renascence by its subordinate and 
secondary side of the Reformation. The Reformation 
has been often called a Hebraising revival, a return to the 
ardour and sincereness of primitive Christianity. No one, 
however, can study the development of Protestantism 
and of Protestant churches without feeling that into the 
Reformation too,—Hebraising child of the Renascence and 
offspring of its fervour, rather than its intelligence, as it 
undoubtedly was,—the subtle Hellenic leaven of the 
Renascence found its way, and that the exact respective 
parts, in the Reformation, of Hebraism and of Hellenism, 
are not easy to separate. But what we may with truth 
say is, that all which Protestantism was to itself clearly 
conscious of, all which it succeeded in clearly setting forth 
in words, had the characters of Hebraism rather than of 
Hellenism. The Reformation was strong, in that it 
was an earnest return to the Bible and to doing from 
the heart the will of God as there written. It was weak, 
in that it never consciously grasped or applied the central 
idea of the Renascence,—the Hellenic idea of pursuing, in 
all lines of activity, the law and science, to use Plato’s 
words, of things as they really are. Whatever direct 
superiority, therefore, Protestantism had over Catholicism 
was a moral superiority, a superiority arising out of its 
gréater-sincerity and earnestness,—at the moment of its 
apparition at’any rate,—in dealing with the heart and 
conscience. Its pretensions to an intellectual superiority 

1] have ventured to give to the foreign word Renaissance,—destined to become 


of more common use amongst us as the movement which it denotes comes, as 
it will come, increasingly to interest us,—an English form. 


140 Culture and Anarchy 


are in general quite illusory. For Hellenism, for the think- 
ing side in man as distinguished from the acting side, the 
attitude of mind of Protestantism towards the Bible 
in no respect differs from the attitude of mind of Catholi- 
cism towards the Church. The mental habit of him who 
imagines that Balaam’s ass spoke, in no respect differs 
from the mental habit of him who imagines that a Ma- 
donna of wood or stone winked; and the one, who says 
that God’s Church makes him believe what he believes, 
and the other, who says that God’s Word makes him 
believe what he believes, are for the philosopher perfectly 
alike in not really and truly knowing, when they say God’s 
Church and God’s Word, what it is they say, or whereof 
they affirm. 

In the sixteenth century, therefore, Hellenism re-entered 
the world, and again stood in presence of Hebraism,—a 
Hebraism renewed and purged. Now, it has not been 
enough observed, how, in the seventeenth century, a 
fate befell Hellenism in some respects analogous to that 
which befell it at the commencement of our era. The 
Renascence, that great re-awakening of Hellenism, that 
irresistible return of humanity to nature and to seeing 
things as they are, which in art, in literature, and in 
physics, produced such splendid fruits, had, like the 
anterior Hellenism of the Pagan world, a side of moral 
weakness and of relaxation or insensibility of the moral 
fibre, which in Italy showed itself with the most startling 
plainness, but which in France, England, and other coun- | 
tries was very apparent too. Again this loss of spiritual 
balance, this exclusive preponderance given to man’s 
perceiving and knowing side, this unnatural defect of his 
feeling and acting side, provoked a reaction. Let us trace 
that reaction where it most nearly concerns us. 

Science has now made visible to everybody the great 


Hebraism and Hellenism 141 


and pregnant elements of difference which lie in race, and 
in how signal a manner they make the genius and history 
of an Indo-European people vary from those of a Semitic 
people. Hellenism is of Indo-European growth, Hebraism 
is of Semitic growth; and we English, a nation of Indo- 
European stock, seem to belong naturally to the move- 
ment of Hellenism. But nothing more strongly marks the 
essential unity of man, than the afhinities we can perceive, 
in this point or that, between members of one family of 
peoples and members of another. And no afhnity of 
this kind is more strongly marked than that likeness 
in the strength and prominence of the moral fibre, which, 
notwithstanding immense elements of difference, knits in 
some special sort the genius and history of us English, and 
our American descendants across the Atlantic, to the 
genius and history of the Hebrew people. Puritanism, 
which has been so great a power in the English nation, 
and in the strongest part of the English nation, was, 


ane s : \ 
originally the reaction in the seventeenth century of the 


conscience and moral sense of our race, against the moral 
indifference and lax rule of conduct which in the sixteenth 
century came in with the Renascence. It was a reaction of 
Hebraism against Hellenism; and it powerfully mani- 
fested itself, as was natural, in a people with much of 
what we call a Hebraising turn, with a signal affinity 
for the bent which was the master-bent of Hebrew life. 
Eminently Indo-European by its humour, by the power 
it shows, through this gift, of imaginatively acknowledging 
the multiform aspects of the problem of life, and of thus 
getting itself unfixed from its own over-certainty, of 
smiling at its own over-tenacity, our race has yet (and 
a great part of its strength lies here), in matters of practical 
life and moral conduct, a strong share of the assuredness, 
the tenacity, the intensity of the Hebrews. This turn 


" 
" 


142 Culture and Anarchy 


manifested itself in Puritanism, and has had a great part 
in shaping our history for the last two hundred years. 
Undoubtedly it checked and changed amongst us that 
movement of the Renascence which we see producing 
in the reign of Elizabeth such wonderful fruits. Un- 
doubtedly it stopped the prominent rule and direct 
development of that order of ideas which we call by the 
name of Hellenism, and gave the first rank to a different 
order of ideas. Apparently, too, as we said of the former 
defeat of Hellenism, if Hellenism was defeated, this shows 
that Hellenism was imperfect, and that its ascendency 
at that moment would not have been for the world’s good. 

Yet there is a very important difference between the 
defeat inflicted on Hellenism by Christianity eighteen 
hundred years ago, and the check given to the Renascence 
by Puritanism. The greatness of the difference is well 
measured by the difference in force, beauty, significance, 
and usefulness, between primitive Christianity and Prot- 
estantism. Eighteen hundred years ago it was altogether 
the hour of Hebraism. Primitive Christianity was legit- 
imately and truly the ascendant force in the world at that 
time, and the way of mankind’s progress lay through its 
full development. Another hour in man’s development 
began..in the fifteenth century, and the main road” of 
his progress then Tay ‘for a time ‘through _ Hellenism. 
Puritanism was no longer the central current of the world’s 
progress, it was a side stream crossing the central current 
and checking it. The cross and the check may have been 
necessary and salutary, but that does not do away with 
the essential difference between the main stream of man’s 
advance and a cross or a side stream.‘ For more than two ~ 
hundred years the main stream of man’s advance has | 
moved towards knowing himself and the world, seeing 
things as they are, spontaneity of consciousness; the main 


i 
: 
; 


- Hebraism and Hellenism 143 


impulse of a great part, and that the strongest part, of our 
nation has been towards strictness of conscience. They 
have made the secondary the principal at the wrong mo- 
ment, and the principal they have at the wrong moment 
treated as secondary. This contravention of the natural 
order has produced, as such contravention always must 
produce, a certain confusion and false movement, of which 
we are now beginning to feel, in almost every direction, 
the inconvenience. In all directions our habitual causes 
of action seem to be losing efficaciousness, credit, and 
control, both with others and even with ourselves. Every- 
where we see the beginnings of confusion, and we want a 
clue to some sound order and authority. This we can only 
get by going back upon the actual instincts and forces 


\ which rule our life, seeing them as they really are, con- 


necting them with other instincts and forces, and enlarging 
our whole view and rule of life. 


CHAPTER V 
PORRO UNUM EST NECESSARIUM 


THE matter here opened is so large, and the trains of 
thought to which it gives rise are so manifold, that we 
must be careful to limit ourselves scrupulously to what 
has a direct bearing upon our actual discussion. We 
have found that at the bottom of our present unsettled 
state, so full of the seeds of trouble, lies the notion of 
its being the prime right and happiness, for each of us, 
to afirm himself, and his ordinary self; to be doing, and 
to be doing freely and as he likes. We have found at 
the bottom of it the disbelief in right reason as a lawful 
authority. It was easy to show from our practice and 
current history that this is so; but it was impossible to 
show why it is so without taking a somewhat wider sweep 
and going into things a little more deeply. Why, in fact, 

should good, well-meaning, energetic, sensible people, 
like the bulk of our countrymen, come to have such 
light belief in right reason, and such an. exaggerated ' 
value for their own independent doing, however crude? , 
‘Théwariswer is: because of an_exclusive..and...excessive 
development in them, without due allowance. for_time, 
place, and circumstance, of that.side..of human nature, 
and that group of human.forces, to which we have given. 
the general name_of.Hebraism. Because they have 
thought their real and only important homage was owed 
to a power concerned with obedience rather than. with 
their intelligence, a power interested in the moral side. 
of their nature almost exclusively, Thus they have ‘been 
led to regard in themselves, as the one thing needful, 
strictness of conscience, the staunch adherence to some 

144. ' 


Porro Unum Est Necessarium 145 


fixed law of doing we have got already, instead of spon- 
taneity of consciousness, which tends continually to en- 
large our whole law of doing. They have fancied them- 
selves to have in their religion a sufficient basis for the 
whole of their life fixed and certain for ever, a full law 
of conduct and a full law of thought, so far as thought 
is needed, as well; whereas what they really have is a 
law of conduct, a law of unexampled power for enabling 
them to war against the law of sin in their members and 
not to serve it in the lusts thereof. The book which con- 
tains this invaluable law they call the Word of God, and 
attribute to it, as I have said, and as, indeed, is perfectly 
well known, a reach and sufficiency co-extensive with 
all the wants of human nature. 

This might, no doubt, be so, if humanity were not 
the composite thing it is, if it had only, or in quite over- 
powering eminence, a moral side, and the group of in- 
stincts and powers which we call moral. But it has be- 
sides, and in notable eminence, an intellectual side, and 
the group of instincts and powers which we call intellec- 
tual. No doubt, mankind makes in general its progress 
in a fashion which gives at one time full swing to one of 
these groups of instincts, at another time to the other; 
and man’s faculties are so intertwined, that when his 
moral side, and the current of force which we call Hebra- 
ism, is uppermost, this side will manage somehow to 
provide, or appear to provide, satisfaction for his in- 
tellectual needs; and when his intellectual side, and the 
current of force which we call Hellenism, is uppermost, 
this again will provide, or appear to provide, satisfaction 
for men’s moral needs. But sooner or later it becomes 
manifest that when the two sides of humanity proceed 
in this fashion of alternate preponderance, and not of 
mutual understanding and balance, the side which is 


146 | Culture and Anarchy 


uppermost does not really provide in a satisfactory man- 
ner for the needs of the side which is undermost, and a 
state of confusion is, sooner or later, the result. The 
Hellenic half of our nature, bearing rule, makes a sort 
of provision for the Hebrew half, but it turns out to be 
an inadequate provision; and again the Hebrew half of 
our nature, bearing rule, makes a sort of provision for 
the Hellenic half, but this, too, turns out to be an inade- 
quate provision. The true and smooth order of human- 
ity’s development is not reached in either way. And 
therefore, while we willingly admit with the Christian 
apostle that the world by wisdom,—that is, by the iso- 
lated preponderance of its intellectual impulses,—knew 
not God, or the true order of things, it is yet necessary, 
also, to set up a sort of converse to this proposition, and 
to say likewise (what is equally true) that the world by 
Puritanism knew not God. And it is on this converse 
of the apostle’s proposition that it is particularly needful 
to insist in our own country just at present. 

Here, indeed, is the answer to many criticisms which 


have been addressed to all that we have said in praise, 
of sweetness and light. \Sweetness and light evidently © 


have to do with the bent or side in humanity which we 


a _ 


call Hellenic. Greek intelligence has obviously for its / 


essence the instinct for what Plato calls the true, firm, 
intelligible law of things; the law of light, of seeing things 
as they are. Even in the natural sciences, where the 
Greeks had not time and means adequately to apply 
this instinct, and where we have gene a great deal fur- 
ther than they did, it is this instinct which is the root of 
the whole matter and the ground of all our success; and 
this instinct the world has mainly learnt of the Greeks, 
inasmuch as they are humanity’s most signal manifesta- 
tion of it. Greek art, again, Greek beauty, have their 


Porro Unum Est Necessarium 147 


root in the same impulse to see things as they really are, 


_ inasmuch as Greek art and beauty rest on fidelity to 


/ 


: 
; 


; 


\ 


nature,—the best nature,—and on a delicate discrimina- 
tion of what this best nature is. To say we work for 
sweetness and light, then, is only another way of saying 
-that we work for Hellenism. But, oh! cry many people, 
sweetness and light are not enough; you must put strength 
or energy along with them, and make a kind of trinity 
of strength, sweetness and light, and then, perhaps, you 
‘may do some good. That is to say, we are to join He- 
braism, strictness of the moral conscience, and manful 
walking by the best light we have, together with Hellen- 
ism, inculcate both, and rehearse the praises of both. 

Or, rather, we may praise both in conjunction, but 
we must be careful to praise Hebraism most. “Culture,” 
says an acute, though somewhat rigid critic, Mr. Sidg- 
wick, “diffuses sweetness and light. I do not undervalue 
these blessings, but religion gives fire and strength, and 
the world wants fire and strength even more than sweet- 
ness and light.” By religion, let me explain, Mr. Sidg- 
wick here means particularly that Puritanism on the 
insuficiency of which I have been commenting and to 
which he says I am unfair. Now, no doubt, it is possible 
to be a fanatical partisan of light and the instincts which 
push us to it, a fanatical enemy of strictness of moral 
conscience and the instincts which push us to it. A fanat- 
icism of this sort deforms and vulgarises the well-known 
work, in some respects so remarkable, of the late Mr. 
Buckle. Such a fanaticism carries its own mark with it, 
in lacking sweetness; and its own penalty, in that, lack- 
ing sweetness, it comes in the end to lack light too. And 
the Greeks,—the great exponents of humanity’s bent 
for sweetness and light united, of its perception that 
the truth of things must be at the same time beauty,— 


148 Culture and Anarchy 


singularly escaped the fanaticism which we moderns, 
whether we Hellenise or whether we Hebraise, are so 
apt to show. They arrived,—though failing, as has been 
said, to give adequate practical satisfaction to the claims 
of man’s moral side,—at the idea of a comprehensive ad- 
justment of the claims of both the sides in man, the 
moral as well as the intellectual, of a full estimate of 
both, and of a reconciliation of both; an idea which is 
philosophically of the greatest value, and the best of 
lessons for us moderns. So we ought to have no difh- 


culty in conceding to Mr. Sidgwick that manful walking. 
by the best light one has,—fire and strength as he calls ) 


it,—has its high value as well as culture, the endeavour 
to see things in their truth and beauty, the pursuit of 
sweetness and light. But whether at this or that time, 
and to this or that set of persons, one ought to insist 
most on the praises of fire and strength, or on the praises 
of sweetness and light, must depend, one would think, 
on the circumstances and needs of that particular time 
and those particular persons. And all that we have been 
saying, and indeed any glance at the world around us 
shows that with us, with the most respectable and strong- 
est part of us, the ruling force is now, and long has been, 
a Puritan force,—the care for fire and strength, strict- 
ness of conscience, Hebraism, rather than the care for 
sweetness and light, spontaneity of consciousness, Hellen- 
ism. ) 

Well, then, what is the good of our now rehearsing 
the praises of fire and strength to ourselves, who dwell 
too exclusively on them already? When Mr. Sidgwick 
says so broadly, that the world wants fire and strength 
even more than sweetness and light, is he not carried 
away by a turn for broad generalisation? does he not 
forget that the world is not all of one piece, and every 


Porro Unum Est Necessarium 149 


piece with the same needs at the same time? It may be 
true that the Roman world at the beginning of our era, 
or Leo the Tenth’s Court at the time of the Reformation, 
or French society in the eighteenth century, needed fire 
and strength even more than sweetness and light. But 
can it be said that the Barbarians who overran the em- 
pire needed fire and strength even more than sweetness 
and light; or that the Puritans needed them more; or that 
Mr. Murphy, the Birmingham lecturer, and his friends, 
need them more? 

the Puritan’s great danger is that he imagines him- 
self in possession of a_rule.telling him-the-unwm necessa- 
rium, or one thing needful, and that he then remains 
satisfied with_a_very crude conception of what.this rule 
really is and what'it tells him, thinks he has now knowl- 
edge and henceforth needs only to act, and, in this dan- 
gerous state of assurance and self-satisfaction, proceeds 
to give full swing to a number of the instincts of his or- 
dinary self. Some of the instincts of his ordinary self 
he has, by the help of his rule of life, conquered; but 
others which he has not conquered by this help he is so 
far from perceiving to need subjugation, and to be in- 
stincts of an inferior self, that he even fancies it to be 
his nght and duty, in virtue of having conquered a limited 
part of himself, to give unchecked swing to the remainder. 
He is, I say, a victim of Hebraism, of the tendency to 
cultivate strictness of conscience rather than spontaneity 
of consciousness. And what he wants is a larger con- 
ception of human nature, showing him the number of 
other points at which his nature must come to its best, 
besides the points which he himself knows and thinks of. 
There is no unum necessarium, or one thing needful, 
which can free human nature from the obligation of try- 
ing to come to its.best at all these points. The real unum 


- 
H 
; 


‘ 
\ 
\ 


150 Culture and Anarchy 


| necessarium for us is to come to our best at all points. 


Instead of our “one thing needful,” justifying in us vul- 
garity, hideousness, ignorance, violence,—our vulgarity, 
hideousness, ignorance, violence, are really so many 
touchstones which try our one thing needful, and which 
prove that in the state, at any rate, in which we our- 
selves have it, it is not all we want. And as the force 
which encourages us to stand staunch and fast by the 
rule and ground we have is Hebraism, so the force which 
encourages us to go back upon this rule, and to try the 
very ground on which we appear to stand, 1s Hellenism,— 
a turn for giving our consciousness free play and en- 
larging its range. And what [ say is, not that Hellenism 
is always for everybody more wanted than Hebraism, 
but that for Mr. Murphy at this particular moment, and 
for the great majority of us his fellow-countrymen, it is 
more wanted. 

Nothing is more striking than to observe in how many 
ways a limited conception of human nature, the notion 
of a one thing needful, a one side in us to be made upper- 
most, the disregard of a full and harmonious development 
of ourselves, tells injuriously on our thinking and acting. 
In the first place, our hold upon the rule or standard, to 
which we look for our one thing needful, tends to become 
less and less near and vital, our conception of it more and 
more mechanical, and more and more unlike the thing 
itself as it was conceived in the mind where it originated. 
The dealings of Puritanism with the writings of St. Paul, 
afford a noteworthy illustration of this. Nowhere so much 
as in the writings of St. Paul, and in that great apostle’s 
greatest work, the Epistle to the Romans, has Puritanism 
found what seemed to furnish it with the one thing need- 
ful, and to give it canons of truth absolute and final. Now 
all writings, as has been already said, even the most 


Sor ab als 


Porro Unum Est Necessarium 151 


precious writings and the most fruitful, must inevitably, 
from the very nature of things, be but contributions to 
human thought and human development, which extend 
wider than they do. Indeed, St. Paul, in the very Epistle 
of which we are speaking, shows, when he asks, ‘‘ Who hath 
known the mind of the Lord?”—who hath known, that is, 
the true and divine order of things in its entirety,—that 
he himself acknowledges this fully. And we have already 
pointed out in another Epistle of St. Paul a great and vital 
idea of the human spirit,—the idea of immortality,— 
transcending and overlapping, so to speak, the expositor’s 
power to give it adequate definition and expression. 

But quite distinct from the question whether St. Paul’s 
expression, or any man’s expression, can be a perfect and 
final expression of truth, comes the question whether we 
rightly seize and understand his expression as it exists. 
Now, perfectly to seize another man’s meaning, as it stood 
in his own mind, is not easy; especially when the man is 
separated from us by such differences of race, training, 
time, and circumstances as St. Paul. But there are degrees 
of nearness in getting at a man’s meaning; and though we 
cannot arrive quite at what St. Paul had in his mind, yet 
we may come near it. And who, that comes thus near it, 
must not feel how terms which St. Paul employs, in trying 
to follow with his analysis of such profound power and 
originality some of the most delicate, intricate, obscure, 
and contradictory workings and states of the human spirit, 
are detached and employed by Puritanism, not in the 
connected and fluid way in which St. Paul employs them, 
and for which alone words are really meant, but in an 
isolated, fixed, mechanical way, as if they were talismans; 
and how all trace and sense of St. Paul’s true movement 
of ideas, and sustained masterly analysis, is thus lost? 
Who, I say, that has watched Puritanism,—the force 


152 Culture and Anarchy 


which so strongly Hebraises, which so takes St. Paul’s 
writings as something absolute and final, containing the 
one thing needful,—handle such terms as grace, faith, 
election, righteousness, but must feel, not only that these 
terms have for the mind of Puritanism a sense false and 
misleading, but also that this sense is the most monstrous 
and grotesque caricature of the sense of St. Paul, and that 
his true meaning is by these worshippers of his words alto- 
gether lost? 

Or to take another eminent example, in which not 
Puritanism only, but, one may say, the whole religious 
world, by their mechanical use of St. Paul’s writings, can 
be shown to miss or change his real meaning. The whole 
religious world, one may say, use now the word resur- 
rection,—a word which is so often in their thoughts and on 
their lips, and which they find so often in St. Paul’s writ- 
ings,—in one sense only. They use it to mean a rising 
again after the physical death of the body. Now it is quite 
true that St. Paul speaks of resurrection in this sense, that 
he tries to describe and explain it, and that he condemns 
those who doubt and deny it-¢ But it is true, also, that in 
nine cases out of ten where St. Paul thinks and speaks of 
resurrection, he thinks and speaks of it in a sense different 
from this;—in the sense of a rising to a new life before the 
physical death of the body, and not after it} The idea on 
which we have already touched, the profound idea of 
being baptized into the death of the great exemplar of 
self-devotion and self-annulment, of repeating in our own 
person, by virtue of identification with our exemplar, his 
course of self-devotion and self-annulment, and of thus 
coming, within the limits of our present life, to a new life, 
in which, as in the death going before it, we are identified 
with our exemplar,—this is the fruitful and original con- 
ception of being risen with Christ which possesses the mind 


Porro Unum Est Necessarium 153 


of St. Paul, and this is the central point round which, with 
such incomparable emotion and eloquence, all his teaching 
moves. For him, the life after our physical death is really, 
in the main but a consequence and continuation of the \ 
inexhaustible energy of the new life thus originated on | 
this side the grave. This grand Pauline idea of Christian | 
resurrection is worthily rehearsed in one of the noblest 
collects of the Prayer-Book, and is destined, no doubt, 
to fill a more and more important place in the Christianity 
of the future. But meanwhile, almost as signal as the 
essentialness of this characteristic idea in St. Paul’s teach- 
ing, is the completeness with which the worshippers of 
St. Paul’s words as an absolute final expression of saving 
truth have lost it, and have substituted for the apostle’s 
living and near conception of a resurrection now, their 
mechanical and remote conception of a resurrection here- 
after. 

In short, so fatal is the notion of possessing, even in the 
most precious words or standards, the one thing needful, 
of having in them, once for all, a full and sufficient measure 
of light to guide us, and of there being no duty left for us 
except to make our practice square exactly with them,— 
so fatal, I say, is this notion to the right knowledge and 
comprehension of the very words or standards we thus 
adopt, and to such strange distortions and perversions 
of them does it inevitably lead, that whenever we hear that 
commonplace which Hebraism, if we venture to inquire 
what a man knows, is so apt to bring out against us, in 
disparagement of what we call culture, and in praise of a 
man’s sticking to the one thing needful,—he knows, says 
Hebraism, his Bible/—whenever we hear this said, we may, 
without any elaborate defence of culture, content our- 
selves with answering simply: ““No man, who knows 
nothing else, knows even his Bible.” 


154 Culture and Anarchy 


Now the force which we have so much neglected, 
Hellenism, may be liable to fail in moral strength and 
earnestness, but by the law of its nature,—the very same 
law which makes it sometimes deficient in intensity when 
intensity is required,—it opposes itself to the notion of 
cutting our being in two, of attributing to one part the 
dignity of dealing with the one thing needful, and leaving 
the other part to take its chance, which is the bane of 
Hebraism. Essential in Hellenism is the impulse to the 
development of the whole man, to connecting and harmo- 
nising all parts of him, perfecting all, leaving none to take 
their chance. 

{ ~The characteristic bent of Hellenism, as has been said, 

(Gs to find the intelligible law of things, to see them in their 
‘true nature and as they really are. But many things are 
not seen in their true nature and as they really are, unless 
they are seen as beautiful. Behaviour is not intelligible, 
does not account for itself to the mind and show the reason 
for its existing, unless it is beautiful. The same with dis- 
course, the same with song, the same with worship, all of 
them modes in which man proves his activity and ex- 
presses himself. To think that when one produces in 
these what is mean, or vulgar, or hideous, one can be per- 
mitted to plead that one has that within which passes 
show; to suppose that the possession of what benefits and 
satishes one part of our being can make allowable either 
discourse like Mr. Murphy’s, or poetry like the hymns 
we all hear, or places of worship like the chapels we all 
see,—this it 1s abhorrent to the nature of Hellenism to 
concede. And to be, like our honoured and justly honoured 
Faraday, a great natural philosopher with one side of his 
being and a Sandemanian with the other, would to Archi- 
medes have been impossible. 

It is evident to what a many-sided perfecting of ‘man’s 


Porro Unum Est Necessarium 155 


powers and activities this demand of Hellenism for 
satisfaction to be given to the mind by everything which 
we do, is calculated to impel our race. It has its dangers, 
as has been fully granted. The notion of this sort of 
equipollency in man’s modes of activity may lead to 
moral relaxation; what we do not make our one thing 
needful, we may come to treat not enough as if it were 
needful, though it is indeed very needful and at the same 
time very hard. Still, what side in us has not its dangers, 
and which of our impulses can be a talisman to give us 
perfection outright, and not merely a help to bring us 
towards it? Has not Hebraism, as we have shown, its 
dangers as well as Hellenism? or have we used so exces- 
sively the tendencies in ourselves to which Hellenism 
makes appeal, that we are now suffering from it? Are we 
not, on the contrary, now suffering because we have 
not enough used these tendencies as a help towards per- 
fection? 

For we see whither it has brought us, the long exclusive 
predominance of Hebraism,—the insisting on perfection 
in one part of our nature and not in all; the singling out 
the moral side, the side of obedience and action, for such 
intent regard; making strictness of the moral conscience 
so far the principal thing, and putting off for hereafter 
and for another world the care for being complete at all 
points, the full and harmonious development. of our 
humanity. Instead of watching and following on its 
ways the desire which, as Plato says, “for ever through 
all the universe tends towards that which is lovely,” we 
think that the world has settled its accounts with this 
desire, knows what this desire wants of it, and that all 
the impulses of our ordinary self which do not conflict 
with the terms of this settlement, in our narrow view of it, 
we may follow unrestrainedly, under the sanction of some 


156 Culture and Anarchy 


such text as ‘Not slothful in business,” or, “‘Whatsoever 
thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might,” or some- 
thing else of the same kind. And to any of these impulses 
we soon come to give that same character of a mechanical, 
absolute law, which we give to our religion; we regard it, 
as we do our religion, as an object for strictness of con- 
science, not for spontaneity of consciousness; for unre- 
mitting adherence on its own account, not for going back 
upon, viewing in its connection with other things, and 
adjusting to a number of changing circumstances. We 
treat it, in short, just as we treat our religion,—as ma- 
chinery. It is in this way that the Barbarians treat their 
bodily exercises, the Philistines their business, Mr. 
Spurgeon his voluntaryism, Mr. Bright the assertion of 
personal liberty, Mr. Beales the right of meeting in Hyde 
Park. In all those cases what is needed is a freer play 
of consciousness upon the object of pursuit; and in all of 
them Hebraism, the valuing staunchness and earnestness 
more than this free play, the entire subordination of 
thinking to doing, has led to a mistaken and misleading 
treatment of things. 

The newspapers a short time ago contained an account . 
of the suicide of a Mr. Smith, secretary to some insurance 
company, who, it was said, “laboured under the apprehen- 
sion that he would come to poverty, and that he was 
eternally lost.””, And when I read these words, it occurred 
to me that the poor man who came to such a mournful end 
was, in truth, a kind of type,—by the selection of his two 
grand objects of concern, by their isolation from every- 
thing else, and their juxtaposition to one another,—of all 
the strongest, most respectable, and most representative 
part of our nation. “He laboured under the apprehension 
that he would come to poverty, and that he was eternally 
lost.” The whole middle class have a conception of 


J 


Porro Unum Est Necessarium 157 


things,—a conception which makes us call them Phil- 
istines,—just like that of this poor man; though we are 
seldom, of course, shocked by seeing it take the distressing, 
violently morbid, and fatal turn, which it took with him. 
But how generally, with how many of us, are the main con- 
'\ cerns of life limited to these two: the concern for making 
\money, and the concern for saving our souls! And how 
entirely does the narrow and mechanical conception of 
our secular business proceed from a narrow and mechanical 
conception of our religious business! What havoc do the 
united conceptions make of our lives! It is because the 
second-named of these two master-concerns presents to us 
the one thing needful in so fixed, narrow, and mechanical a 
way, that so ignoble a fellow master-concern to it as 
the first-named becomes possible; and, having been once 
admitted, takes the same rigid and absolute character as 
the other. 

- Poor Mr. Smith had sincerely the nobler master-concern 
as well as the meaner,—the concern for saving his soul 
(according to the narrow and mechanical conception 
- which Puritanism has of what the salvation of the soul 
is), as well as the concern for making money. But let 
us remark how many people there are, especially outside 
the limits of the serious and conscientious middle class to 
which Mr. Smith belonged, who take up with a meaner 
master-concern,—whether it be pleasure, or field-sports, 
or bodily exercises, or business, or popular agitation,— 
who take up with one of these exclusively, and neglect 
Mr. Smith’s nobler master-concern, because of the 
mechanical form which Hebraism has given to this noble 
master-concern. Hebraism makes it stand, as we have 
said, as something talismanic, isolated, and all-sufficient, 
justifying our giving our ordinary selves free play in 
bodily exercises, or business, or popular agitation, if we 


158 Culture and Anarchy 


have made our accounts square with this master-concern; 
and, if we have not, rendering other things indifferent, 
and our ordinary self all we have to follow, and to follow 
‘with all the energy that is in us, till we do. Whereas the 
idea of perfection at all points, the encouraging in our- 
selves spontaneity of consciousness, and letting a free 
play of thought live and flow around all our activity, the 
indisposition to allow one side of our activity to stand as so 
all-important and all-sufficing that it makes other sides 
indifferent,—this bent of mind in us may not only check us 
in following unreservedly a mean master-concern of any 
kind, but may even, also, bring new life and movement 
into that side of us with which alone Hebraism concerns 
itself, and awaken a healthier and less mechanical activity 
there. Hellenism may thus actually serve to further the 
designs of Hebraism. 

Undoubtedly it thus served in the first days of Christian- 
ity. Christianity, as has been said, occupied itself, like 
Hebraism, with the moral side of man exclusively, with 
his moral affections and moral conduct; and so far it 
was but a continuation of Hebraism. But it transformed 
and renewed Hebraism by criticising a fixed rule, which 
had become mechanical, and had thus lost its vital motive 
power; by letting the thought play freely around this 
old rule, and perceive its inadequacy; by developing a 
new motive power, which men’s moral consciousness could 
take living hold of, and could move in sympathy with. 
What was this but an importation of Hellenism, as we 
have defined it, into Hebraism? St. Paul used the contra- 
diction between the Jew’s profession and practice, his 
shortcomings on that very side of moral affection and 
moral conduct which the Jew and St. Paul, both of them, 
‘regarded as all in all (“Thou that sayest a man should not 
steal, dost thou steal? thou that sayest a man should 


Porro Unum Est Necessarium 159 


not commit adultery, dost thou commit adultery?’’), for 
a proof of the inadequacy of the old rule of life in the Jew’s 
mechanical conception of it; and tried to rescue him by 
making his consciousness play freely around this rule,— 
that is, by a so far Hellenic treatment of it. Even so we, 
too, when we hear so much said of the growth of commer- 
cial immorality in our serious middle class, of the melting 
away of habits of strict probity before the temptation 
to get quickly rich and to cut a figure in the world; when 
we see, at any rate, so much confusion of thought and of 
practice in this great representative class of our nation,— 
may we not be disposed to say, that this confusion shows 
that his new motive-power of grace and imputed right- 
eousness has become to the Puritan as mechanical, and 
with as ineffective a hold upon his practice, as the old 
motive-power of the law was to the Jew? and that the 
remedy is the same as that which St. Paul employed,— 
an importation of what we have called Hellenism into 
his Hebraism, a making his consciousness flow freely 
round his petrified rule of life and renew it? Only with 
this difference: that whereas St. Paul imported Hellenism 
within the limits of our moral part only, this part being 
still treated by him as all in all; and whereas he well-nigh 
exhausted, one may say, and used to the very uttermost, 
the possibilities of fruitfully importing it on that side 
exclusively; we ought to try and import it,—guiding 
ourselves by the ideal of a human nature harmoniously 
perfect in all points,—into all the lines of our activity. 
Only by so doing can we rightly quicken, refresh, and 
renew those very instincts, now so much baffled, to which 
Hebraism makes appeal. 

But if we will not be warned by the confusion visible 
enough at present in our thinking and acting, that we are 
in a false line in having developed our Hebrew side so 


160 Culture and Anarchy 


exclusively, and our Hellenic side so feebly and at random, 
in loving fixed rules of action so much more than the 
intelligible law of things, let us listen to a remarkable 
testimony which the opinion of the world around us offers. 
All the world now sets great and increasing value on three 
objects which have long been very dear to us, and pursues 
them in its own way, or tries to pursue them. These 
three objects are industrial enterprise, bodily exercises, and 
freedom. Certainly we have, before and beyond our 
neighbours, given ourselves to these three things with 
ardent passion and with high success. And this our 
neighbours cannot but acknowledge; and they must 
needs, when they themselves turn to these things, have 
an eye to our example, and take something of our prac- 
tice. - 

Now, generally, when people are interested in an object 
of pursuit, they cannot help feeling an enthusiasm for 
those who have already laboured successfully at it, and 
for their success. Not only do they study them, they also 
love and admire them. In this way a man who is in- 
terested in the art of war not only acquaints himself with 
the performance of great generals, but he has an admiration 
and enthusiasm for them. So, too, one who wants to be 
a painter or a poet cannot help loving and admiring the 
great painters or poets, who have gone before him and 
shown him the way. 

But it is strange with how little of love, admiration, 
or enthusiasm, the world regards us and our freedom, 
our bodily exercises, and our industrial prowess, much as 
these things themselves are beginning to interest it. And 
is not the reason because we follow each of these things 
in a mechanical manner, as an end in and for itself, and 
not in reference to a general end of human perfection; and 
this makes the pursuit of them uninteresting to humanity, 


Porro Unum Est Necessarium 161 


and not what the world truly wants? It seems to them 
mere machinery that we can, knowingly, teach them to 
worship,—a mere fetish. British freedom, British indus- 
try, British muscularity, we work for each of these three 
things blindly, with no notion of giving each its due pro- 
portion and prominence, because we have no ideal of 
harmonious human perfection before our minds, to set our 
work in motion, and to guide it. So the rest of the world, 
desiring industry, or freedom, or bodily strength, yet 
desiring these not, as we do, absolutely, but as means to 
something else, imitate, indeed, of our practice what seems 
useful for them, but us, whose practice they imitate, they 
seem to entertain neither love nor admiration for. 

Let us observe, on the other hand, the love and enthu- 
siasm excited by others who have laboured for these very 
things. Perhaps of what we call industrial enterprise it 
is not easy to find examples in former times; but let us 
consider how Greek freedom and Greek gymnastics have 
attracted the love and praise of mankind, who give so 
little love and praise to ours. And what can be the reason 
of this difference? Surely because the Greeks pursued free- 
dom and pursued gymnastics not mechanically, but with 
constant reference to some ideal of complete human perfec- 
tion and happiness. And therefore, in spite of faults and 
failures, they interest and delight by their pursuit of 
them all the rest of mankind, who instinctively feel that 
only as things are pursued with reference to this ideal 
are they valuable. 

Here again, therefore, as in the confusion into which 
the thought and action of even the steadiest class amongst 
us is beginning to fall, we seem to have an admonition 
that we have fostered our Hebraising instincts, our pref- 
erence of earnestness of doing to delicacy and flexibility 
of thinking, too exclusively, and have been landed by 


162 Culture and Anarchy 


them im a mechanical and unfruitful routine. And again 
we seem taught that the development of our Hellenising 
instincts, seeking ardently the intelligible law of things, 
and making a stream of fresh thought play freely about 
our stock notions and habits, is what is most wanted by 
us at present. 

Well, then, from all sides, the more we go into the 
matter, the currents seem to converge, and together to 
bear us along towards culture. If we look at the world 
outside us we find a disquieting absence of sure authority. 
We discover that only in right reason can we get a source 
of sure authority; and culture brings us towards right 
reason. If we look at our own inner world, we find all 
manner of confusion arising out of the habits of unin- 
telligent routine and one-sided growth, to which a too 
exclusive worship of fire, strength, earnestness, and action, 
has brought us. What we want is a fuller harmonious 
development of our humanity, a free play of thought 
upon our routine notions, spontaneity of consciousness, 
sweetness and light; and these are just what culture 
generates and fosters. We will not stickle for a name, 

rand the name of culture one might easily give up, if only 
those who decry the frivolous and pedantic sort of cul- 
ture, but wish at bottom for the same things as we do, 
would be careful on their part, not, in disparaging and 
discrediting the false culture, to unwittingly disparage 
and discredit, among a people with little natural rever- 
ence for it, the true also. But what we are concerned 
for is the thing, not the name; and the thing, call it by 
what name we will, is simply the enabling ourselves, by 
getting to know, whether through reading, observing, 
or thinking, the best that can at present be known in 
the world, to come as near as we can to the firm intelli- 
gible law of things, and thus to get a basis for a less con- 


Porro Unum Est Necessarium 163 


fused action and a more complete perfection than we 
have at present. 

And now, therefore, when we are accused of preach- 
ing up a spirit of cultivated inaction, of provoking the 
earnest lovers of action, of refusing to lend a hand at 
uprooting certain definite evils, of despairing to find any 
lasting truth to minister to the diseased spirit of our 
time, we shall not be so much confounded and embar- 
rassed what to answer for ourselves. We shall say boldly 
that we do not at all despair of finding some lasting 
truth to minister to the diseased spirit of our time; but 
that we have discovered the best way of finding this to 
be not so much by lending a hand to our friends and 
countrymen in their actual operations for the removal 
of certain definite evils, but rather in getting our friends 
and countrymen to seek culture, to let their conscious~ 
ness play freely round their present operations and the 
stock notions on which they are founded, show what 
these are like, and how related to the intelligible law of 
things, and auxiliary to true human perfection. 


CHAPTER VI 


OUR LIBERAL PRACTITIONERS 


But an unpretending writer, without a philosophy based 
on inter-dependent, subordinate, and coherent principles, 
must not presume to indulge himself too much in gen- 
eralities. He must keep close to the level ground of com- 
mon fact, the only safe ground for understandings with- 
out a scientific equipment. Therefore, since I have spoken 
so slightingly of the practical operations in which my 
friends and countrymen are at this moment engaged for 
the removal of certain definite evils, I am bound to take, 
before concluding, some of those operations, and to 
make them, if I can, show the truth of what I have ad- 
vanced. 

Probably I would hardly give a greater proof of my 
_confessed inexpertness in reasoning and arguing, than 
by taking, for my first example of an operation of this 
kind, the proceedings for the disestablishment..of the 
Irish Church, which we are now witnessing.! It seems 
so clear that this is surely one of those operations for 
the uprooting of a certain definite evil in which one’s 
Liberal friends engage, and have a right to complain, 
and to get impatient, and to reproach one with delicate 
Conservative scepticism and cultivated inaction, if one 
does not lend a hand to help them. This does, indeed, 
seem evident; and yet this operation comes so promi- 
nently before us at this moment,?—it so challenges every- 
body’s regard,—that one seems cowardly in blinking it. 
So let us venture to try and see whether this conspicuous 

1 Written in 1869. 

2 1869, 

164 


Our Liberal Practitioners 165 


operation is one of those round which we need to let our 
consciousness play freely and reveal what manner of 
spirit we are of in doing it; or whether it is one which 
by no means admits the application of this doctrine of 
ours, and one to which we ought to lend a hand imme- 
diately. 
I 

Now it seems plain that the present Church-establish- 
ment in Ireland is contrary to reason and justice, in so 
far as the Church of a very small minority of the people 
there takes for itself all the Church-property of the 
Irish people. And one would think, that property, as- 
signed for the purpose of providing. for a people’s reli- 
gious worship when that worship was one, the State 
should, when that worship is split into several forms, 
apportion between those several forms. But the ap- 
portionment should be made with due regard to circum- 
stances, taking account only of great differences, which 
are likely to be lasting, and of considerable communions, 
which are likely to represent profound and widespread 
religious characteristics. It should overlook petty dif- 
ferences, which have no serious reason for lasting, and 
inconsiderable communions, which can hardly be taken 
to express any broad and necessary religious lineaments 
of our common nature. This is just in accordance with 
that maxim about the State which we have more than 


once used: The State 15 of the religion of all its citizens, 
\ 


without the fanaticism of any of them. Those who deny | 


‘this, either think so poorly of the State that they do 


not like to see religion condescend to touch the State, 
or they think so poorly of religion that they do not like 
to see the State condescend to touch religion. But no 
good statesman will easily think thus unworthily either 
of the State or of religion. 





166 Culture and Anarchy 


Our statesmen of both parties were inclined, one may 
say, to follow the natural line of the State’s duty, and 
to make in Ireland some fair apportionment of Church- 
property between large and radically divided religious 
communions in that country. But then it was discovered 
that in Great Britain the national mind, as it is called, 
is grown averse to endowments for religion and will 
make no new ones; and though this in itself looks general 
and solemn enough, yet there were found political phi- 
losophers to give it a look of more generality and more 
solemnity still, and to elevate, by their dexterous com- 
mand of powerful and beautiful language, this supposed 
edict of the British national mind into a sort of for- 
mula for expressing a great law of religious transition 
and progress for all the world. 

But we, who, having no coherent philosophy, must 
not let ourselves philosophise, only see that the Eng- 
lish and Scotch Nonconformists have a great horror of 
establishments and endowments for religion, which, they 
assert, were forbidden by Jesus Christ when he said: 
“My kingdom is not of this world;” and that the Non- 
conformists will be delighted to aid statesmen in dis- 
establishing any church, but will suffer none to be estab- 
lished or endowed if they can help it. Then we see that 
the Nonconformists make the strength of the Liberal 
Majority in the House of Commons; and that, therefore, 
the leading Liberal statesmen, to get the support of the 
Nonconformists, forsake the notion of fairly apportion- 
ing Church-property in Ireland among the chief reli- 
gious communions, declare that the national mind has 
decided against new endowments, and propose simply 
to disestablish and disendow the present establishment 
in Ireland without establishing or endowing any other. 
The actual power, in short, by virtue of which the Liberal 


— 
——— 


Our Liberal Practitioners 167 


party in the House of Commons is now trying to dis- 
establish the Irish Church, is not the power of reason and 
justice, it is the power of the Nonconformists’ antipathy 
to Church establishments. 

Clearly it is this; because Liberal statesmen, relying 
on the power of reason and justice to help them, pro- 
posed something quite different from what they now 
propose; and they proposed what they now propose, 
and talked of the decision of the national mind, because 
they had to rely on the English and Scotch Nonconform- 
ists. And clearly the Nonconformists are actuated by 
antipathy to establishments, not by antipathy to the 
injustice and irrationality of the present appropriation 
of Church-property in Ireland; because Mr. Spurgeon, 
in his eloquent and memorable letter, expressly avowed 
that he would sooner leave things as they are in Ireland, 
that is, he would sooner let the injustice and irrationality 
of the present appropriation continue, than do any- 
thing to set up the Roman image,—that is, than give 
the Catholics their fair and reasonable share of Church- 
property. * Most indisputably, therefore, we may affirm 
that the real moving power by which the Liberal party 
are now operating the overthrow of the Irish establish- 
ment is the antipathy of the Nonconformists to Church- 
establishments, and not the sense of reason or justice, 
except so far as reason and justice may be contained in 
this antipathy. And thus the matter stands at present. 

Now surely we must all see many inconveniences in 
performing the operation of uprooting this evil, the 
Irish Church-establishment, in this particular way. As 
was said about industry and freedom and gymnastics, 
we shall never awaken love and gratitude by this mode 
of operation; for it 1s pursued, not in view of reason and 
justice and human perfection and all that enkindles the 


168 Culture and Anarchy 


enthusiasm of men, but it is pursued in view of a cer- 
tain stock notion, or fetish, of the Nonconformists, 
which proscribes Church-establishments. And yet, evi- 
dently, one of the main benefits to be got by operat- 
fing on the Irish Church is to win the affections of the 
Irish people. Besides this, an operation performed in 
virtue of a mechanical rule, or fetish, like the supposed 
decision of the English national mind against new en- 
dowments, does not easily inspire respect in its adver- 
saries, and make their opposition feeble and hardly to 
be persisted in, as an operation evidently done in virtue 
of reason and justice might. For reason and justice 
have in them something persuasive amd irresistible; but 
a fetish or mechanical maxim, like this of the Noncon- 
formists, has in it nothing at all to conciliate either the 
affections or the understanding. Nay, it provokes the 
counter-employment of other fetishes or mechanical 
maxims on the opposite side, by which the confusion 
and hostility already prevalent are heightened. Only 
in this way can be explained the apparition of such 
fetishes as are beginning to be set up on the Conserva- 
tive side against the fetish of the Nonconformists:— 
The Constitution 1n danger! The bulwark of British free- 
dom menaced! The lamp of the Reformation put out! 
No Popery!—and so on. To elevate these against an 
operation relying on reason and justice to back it, is 
not so easy, or so tempting to human infirmity, as to 
elevate them against an operation relying on the Non- 
conformists’ antipathy to Church-establishments to back 
it. For after all, No Popery! is a rallying cry which 

_ touches the human spirit quite as vitally as No Church- 
| f establishments!—that is to say, neither the one nor the 
_ other, in themselves, touch the human spirit vitally at all. 
Ought the believers in action, then, to be so impatient 


Pe ae 


Our Liberal Practitioners 169 


with us, if we say, that even for the sake of this operation 
of theirs itself and its satisfactory accomplishment, it is 
more important to make our consciousness play freely 
round the stock notion or habit on which their operation 
relies for aid, than to lend a hand to it straight away? 
Clearly they ought not; because nothing is so effectual for 
operating as reason and justice, and a free play of thought 
will either disengage the reason and justice lying hid in the 
Nonconformist fetish, and make them effectual, or else 
it will help to get this fetish out of the way, and to let 
statesmen go freely where reason and justice take 
them. 

So, suppose we take this absolute rule, this mechanical 
maxim of Mr. Spurgeon and the Nonconformists, that 
Church-establishments are bad things because Jesus 
Christ said: “My kingdom is not of this world.” Suppose 
we try and make our consciousness bathe and float this 
piece of petrifaction,—for such it now 1s,—and bring it 
within the stream of the vital movement of our thought 
and into relation with the whole intelligible law of things. 
An enemy and a disputant might probably say that much 
of the machinery which Nonconformists themselves 
employ,—the Liberation Society which exists already, 
and the Nonconformist Union which Mr. Spurgeon desires 
to see existing,—come within the scope of Christ’s words 
as well as Church-establishments. This, however, is 
merely a negative and contentious way of dealing with the 
Nonconformist maxim; whereas what we desire is to bring 
this maxim within the positive and vital movement of 
our thought. We say, therefore, that Jesus Christ’s words 
mean that his religion is a force of inward persuasion 
acting on the soul, and not a force of outward constraint 
acting on the body; and if the Nonconformist maxim 
against Church-establishments and Church-endowments 


170 Culture and Anarchy 


has warrant given to it from what Christ thus meant, 
then their maxim is good, even though their own practice 
in the matter of the Liberation Society may be at variance 
with it. 

And here we cannot but remember what we have for- 
merly said about religion, Miss Cobbe, and the British Col- 
lege of Health in the New Road. In religion there are two 
parts, the part of thought and speculation, and the part 
of worship and devotion. Jesus Christ certainly meant 
his religion, as a force of inward persuasion acting on the 
soul, to employ both parts as perfectly as possible. Now 
thought and speculation is eminently an individual matter, 
and worship and devotion is eminently a collective matter. 
It does not help me to think a thing more clearly that 
thousands of other people are thinking the same; but 
it does help me to worship with more emotion that thou- 
sands of other people are worshipping with me. The con- 
secration of common consent, antiquity, public establish- 
ment, long-used rites, national edifices, is everything for 
religious worship. ‘‘Just what makes worship impres- 
sive,” says Joubert, “‘is its publicity, its external manifes- 
tation, its sound, its splendour, its observance universally 
and visibly holding its sway through all the details both 
of our outward and of our inward life.’ Worship, there- 
fore, should have in it as little as possible of what divides 
us, and should be as much as possible a common and 
public act; as Joubert says again: “‘The best prayers are 
those which have nothing distinct about them, and which 
are thus of the nature of simple adoration.” For, “‘the 
same devotion,” as he says in another place, ‘“‘unites men 
far more than the same thought and knowledge.”’? Thought 
and knowledge, as we have said before, is eminently some- 
thing individual, and of our own; the more we possess it 
as strictly of our own, the more power it has on us. Man 


Our Liberal Practitioners 171 


worships best, therefore, with the community; he philoso- 
phises best alone. 

So it seems that whoever would truly give eect! to 
Jesus Christ’s declaration that his religion is a force of 
inward persuasion acting on the soul, would leave our 
thought on the intellectual aspects of Christianity as in- 
dividual as possible, but would make Christian worship 
as collective as possible. Worship, then, appears to be 
eminently a matter for public and national establishment; 
for even Mr. Bright, who, when he stands in Mr. Spur- 
geon’s great Tabernacle, is so ravished with admiration, 
will hardly say that the great Tabernacle and its worship 
are in themselves, as a temple and service of religion, so 
impressive and affecting as the public and national West- 
minster Abbey, or Notre Dame, with their worship. And 
when, immediately after the great Tabernacle, one comes 
plump down to the mass of private and individual estab- 
blishments of religious worship, establishments falling, 
like the British College of Health in the New Road, con- 
spicuously short of what a public and national establish- 
ment might be, then one cannot but feel that Jesus Christ’s 
command to make his religion a force of persuasion to the 
soul, is, so far as one main source of persuasion is con- 
cerned, altogether set at nought. 

But perhaps the Nonconformists worship so unim- 
pressively because they philosophise so keenly; and one 
part of religion, the part of public national worship, they 
have subordinated to the other part, the part of individual 
thought and knowledge? ‘This, however, their organisa- 
tion in congregations forbids us to admit. ‘They are 
members of congregations, not isolated thinkers; and a 
free play of individual thought is at least as much impeded 
by membership of a small congregation as by membership 
of a great Church. Thinking by batches of fifties is to the 


172 Culture and Anarchy 


full as fatal to free thought as thinking by batches of 
thousands. Accordingly, we have had occasion already to 
notice that Nonconformity does not at all differ from the 
Established Church by having worthier or more _philo- 
sophical ideas about God, and the ordering of the world, 
than the Established Church has. It has very much the 
same ideas about these as the Established Church has, but 
it differs from the Established Church in that its worship 
is a much less collective and national affair. 

So Mr. Spurgeon and the Nonconformists seem to have 
misapprehended the true meaning of Christ’s words, My 
kingdom is not of this world. Because, by these words, 
Christ meant that his religion was to work on the soul. 
And of the two parts of the soul on which religion works,— 
the thinking and speculative part, and the feeling and 
imaginative part,—Nonconformity satisfies the first no 
better than the Established Churches, which Christ by 
these words is supposed to have condemned, satisfy it; 
and the second part it satisfies even worse than the Estab- 
lished Churches. And thus the balance of advantage 
seems to rest with the Established Churches; and they 
seem to have apprehended and applied Christ’s words, 
if not with perfect adequacy, at least less inadequately 
than the Nonconformists. 

Might it not, then, be urged with great force that the 
way to do good, in presence of this operation for uprooting 
the Church-establishment in Ireland by the power of 
the Nonconformists’ antipathy to publicly establishing or 
endowing religious worship, is not by lending a hand 
straight away to the operation, and Hebraising,—that is, 
in this case, taking an uncritical interpretation of certain 
Bible words as our absolute rule of conduct,—with the 
Nonconformists? It may be very well for born Hebra- 
isers, like Mr. Spurgeon, to Hebraise; but for Liberal 


Our Liberal Practitioners 173 


statesmen to Hebraise is surely unsafe, and to see poor old 
Liberal hacks Hebraising, whose real self belongs to a kind 
of negative Hellenism,—a state of moral indifferency 
without intellectual ardour,—is even painful. And when, 
by our Hebraising, we neither do what the better mind of 
statesmen prompted them to do, nor win the affections of 
the people we want to conciliate, nor yet reduce the op- \ 
position of our adversaries but rather heighten it, surely — 
it may not be unreasonable to Hellenise a little, to let our , 
thought and consciousness play freely about our proposed | 
operation and its motives, dissolve these motives if they 
are unsound,—which certainly they have some appearance, 
at any rate, of being,—and create in their stead, if they 
are, a set of sounder and more persuasive motives conduct- 
ing to a more solid operation. May not the man who 
promotes this be giving the best help towards finding 
some lasting truth to minister to the diseased spirit of his 
time, and does he really deserve that the believers in action 
should grow impatient with him? 


II 


But now to take another operation which does not at 
this moment so excite people’s feelings as the disestablish- 
ment of the Irish Church, but which, I suppose, would 
also be called exactly one of those operations of simple, 
practical, common-sense reform, aiming at the removal 
of some particular abuse, and rigidly restricted to that 
object, to which a Liberal ought to lend a hand, and de- 
serves that other Liberals should grow impatient with him 
if he does not. This operation I had the great advantage 
of with my own ears hearing discussed in the House of 
Commons, and recommended by a powerful speech from 
that famous speaker, Mr. Bright. So that the effeminate 


174 Culture and Anarchy 


horror which, it is alleged, I have of practical reforms of 
this kind, was put to a searching test; and if it survived, 
it must have, one would think, some reason or other to 
support it, and can hardly quite merit the stigma of its 
present name. 

The operation I mean was that which the Real Estate 
Intestacy | Bill aimed at accomplishing, and the discussion 
on this bill I heard in the House of Commons. The bill 
proposed, as every one knows, to prevent. the land. of..a 
man who dies intestate from going, as It goes now, to his 

eldest son, ‘and was thought, by its friends and by its 
enemies, to be a step towards abating the now almost 
exclusive possession of the land of this country by the 
people whom we call the Barbarians. Mr. Bright, and 
other speakers on his side, seemed to hold that there is a 
kind of natural law or fitness of things which assigns to 
-all a man’s children a right to equal shares in the enjoy- 
ment of his property after his death; and that if, without 
depriving a man of an Englishman’s prime privilege of 
doing what he likes by making what will he chooses, you 
provide that when he makes none his land shall be divided 
among his family, then you give the sanction of the law 
to the natural fitness of things, and inflict a sort of check 
on the present violation of this by the Barbarians. 

It occurred to me, when I saw Mr. Bright and his 
friends proceeding in this way, to ask myself a question. 
If the most exclusive possession of the land of this country 
by the Barbarians is a bad thing, is this practical opera- 
tion of the Liberals, and the stock notion, on which it 
seems to rest, about the natural right of children to share 
equally in the enjoyment of their father’s property. after 
his death, the best and most effective means of dealing 
with it? Or is it best dealt with by letting one’s thought 
and consciousness play freely and naturally upon the 


ot 


Our Liberal Practitioners 175 


Barbarians, this Liberal operation, and the stock notion 
at the bottom of it, and trying to get as near as we can 
to the intelligible law of things as to each of them? 

Now does any one, if he simply and naturally reads 
his consciousness, discover that he has any rights at all? 
For my part, the deeper I go in my own consciousness, 
and the more simply I abandon myself to it, the more 
it seems to tell me that I have no rights at all, only duties; 
and that men get this notion of nights from a process 
of abstract reasoning, inferring that the obligations they 
are conscious of towards others, others must be con- 
scious of towards them, and not from any direct witness 
of consciousness at all. But it is obvious that the notion 
of a right, arrived at in this way, 1s likely to stand as a 
formal and petrified thing, deceiving and misleading us; 
and that the notions got directly from our consciousness 
ought to be brought to bear upon it, and to control it. 
So it is unsafe and misleading to say that our children 
have rights against us; what is true and safe to say 1s, 
that we have duties towards our children. But who 


“will find among these natural duties, set forth to us by 


our consciousness, the obligation to leave to all our chil- 


_ dren an equal share in the enjoyment of our property? 


“Or, though consciousness tells us we ought to provide 


for our children’s welfare, whose consciousness tells him 
_ that the enjoyment of property is in itself welfare? 


\ Whether our children’s welfare is best served by their 


all sharing equally in our property, depends on circum- 


stances and on the state of the community in which we 
live. With this equal sharing, society could not, for 
example, have organised itself afresh out of the chaos 
left by the fall of the Roman Empire; and to have an 
organised society to live in is more for a child’s welfare 
than to have an equal share of his father’s property. 


¥ 


176 Culture and Anarchy 


So we see how little convincing force the stock notion 
on which the Real Estate Intestacy Bill was based,— 
the notion that in the nature and fitness of things all 
a man’s children have a right to an equal share in the 
enjoyment of what he leaves,—really has; and how power- 
less, therefore, it must of necessity be to persuade and 
win any one who has habits and interests which disin- 
cline him to it. On the other hand, the practical opera- 
tion proposed relies entirely, if it is to be effectual in 
altering the present practice of the Barbarians, on the 
power of truth and persuasiveness in the notion which 
it seeks to consecrate; for it leaves to the Barbarians 
full liberty to continue their present practice, to which 
all their habits and interests incline them, unless the 
promulgation of.a notion, which we have seen to have 
no vital efficacy and hold upon our consciousness shall 
hinder them. 

Are we really to adorn an operation of this kind, merely 
because it proposes to do something, with all the favour- 
able epithets of simple, practical, common-sense, definite; 
to enlist on its side all the zeal of the believers in action, 
and to call indifference to it an effeminate horror of use- 
ful reforms? It seems to me quite easy to show that a 
free disinterested play of thought on the Barbarians and 
their land-holding is a thousand times more really prac- 
tical, a thousand times more likely to lead to some effec- 
tive result, than an operation such as that of which we 
have been now speaking. For if, casting aside the im- 
pediments of stock notions and mechanical action, we 
try to find the intelligible law of things respecting a great 
land-owning class such as we have in this country, does 
not our consciousness readily tell us that whether the 
perpetuation of such a class is for its own real good and 
for the real good of the community, depends on the actual 


7 


- 


Our Liberal Practitioners ye 


circumstances of this class and of the community? Does 
it not readily tell us that wealth, power, and considera- 
tion are,—and above all when inherited and not earned,— 
in themselves trying and dangerous things? as Bishop 
Wilson excellently says: “‘Riches are almost always 
abused without a very extraordinary grace.” But this 
extraordinary grace was in great measure supplied by the 
circumstances of the feudal epoch, out of which our land- 
holding class, with its rules of inheritance, sprang. The 
labour and contentions of a rude, nascent, and strug- 
gling society supplied it. These perpetually were trying, 
chastising, and forming the class whose predominance 
was then needed by society to give it points of cohesion, 
and was not so harmful to themselves because they were 
thus sharply tried and exercised. But in a luxurious, 
settled and easy society, where wealth offers the means 
of enjoyment a thousand times more, and the tempta- 
tion to abuse them is thus made a thousand times greater, 
the exercising discipline is at the same time taken away, 
and the feudal class is left exposed to the full operation 
of the natural law well put by the French moralist: 
Pouvoir sans savoir est fort dangereux. And, for my part, 
when I regard the young people of this class, it is above 
all by the trial and shipwreck made of their own welfare 
by the circumstances in which they live that I am struck. 
How far better it would have been for nine out of every 
ten among them, if they had had their own way to make 
in the world, and not been tried by a condition for which 
they had not the extraordinary grace requisite! 

This, I say, seems to be what a man’s consciousness, 


. simply consulted, would tell him about the actual wel- 


fare of our Barbarians themselves. Then, as to the 
effect upon the welfare of the community, how can that 
be salutary, if a class which, by the very possession of 


178 Culture and Anarchy 


wealth, power and consideration, becomes a kind of ideal 
or standard for the rest of the community, is tried by 
ease and pleasure more than it can well bear, and almost 
irresistibly carried away from excellence and strenuous 
virtue? This must certainly be what Solomon meant 
when he said: “As he who putteth a stone in a sling, so 
is he that giveth honour to a fool.” 

For any one can perceive how this honouring of a 
false ideal, not of intelligence and strenuous virtue, but 
of wealth and station, pleasure and ease, is as a stone 
- from a sling to kill in our great middle class, in us who 
are called Philistines, the desire before spoken of, which 
by nature for ever carries all men towards that which 
is lovely; and to leave instead of it only a blind deteriorat- 
ing pursuit, for ourselves also, of the false ideal. And 
in those among us Philistines whom the desire does not 
wholly abandon, yet, having no excellent ideal set forth 
to nourish and to steady it, it meets with that natural 
bent for the bathos which together with this desire it- 
self is implanted at birth in the breast of man, and is by 
that force twisted awry, and borne at random hither 
and thither, and at last flung upon those grotesque and 
hideous forms of popular religion which the more re- 
spectable part among us Philistines mistake for the true 
goal of man’s desire after all that is lovely. And for the 
Populace this false idea is a stone which kills the desire 
before it can even arise; so impossible and unattainable 
for them do the conditions of that which is lovely ap- 
pear according to this ideal to be made, so necessary to 
the reaching of them by the few seems the falling short 
of them by the many. So that, perhaps, of the actual 
vulgarity of our Philistines and brutality of our Populace, 
the Barbarians and their feudal habits of succession, 
enduring out of their due time and place, are involun- 


Our Liberal Practitioners 179 


tarily the cause in a great degree; and they hurt the 
welfare of the rest of the community at the same time 
that as we have seen, they hurt their own. 

But must not, now, the working in our minds of con- 
siderations like these, to which culture, that is, the dis- 
interested and active use of reading, reflection, and ob- 
servation, in the endeavour to know the best that can 
be known, carries us, be really much more effectual to 
the dissolution of feudal habits and rules of succession 
in land than an operation like the Real Estate Intestacy 
Bill, and a stock notion like that of the natural nght of 
all a man’s children to an equal share in the enjoyment 
of his property; since we have seen that this mechanical 
maxim is unsound, and that, if it is unsound, the opera- 
tion relying upon it cannot possibly be effective? If truth 
and reason have, as we believe, any natural, irresistible 
effect on the mind of man, it must. These considera- 
tions, when culture has called them forth and given them 
free course in our minds, will live and work. They will 
work gradually, no doubt, and will not bring us our- 
selves to the front to sit in high place and put them into 
effect; but so they will be all the more beneficial. Every- 
thing teaches us how gradually nature would have all 
profound changes brought about; and we can even see, 
too, where the absolute abrupt stoppage of feudal habits 
has worked harm. And appealing to the sense of truth 
and reason, these considerations will, without doubt, 
touch and move all those of even the Barbarians them- 
selves, who are (as are some of us Philistines also, and 
some of the Populace) beyond their fellows quick of feel- 
ing for truth and reason. For indeed this is just one of 
the advantages of sweetness and light over fire and 
strength, that sweetness and light make a feudal class 
quietly and gradually drop its feudal habits because 


= 


180 Culture and Anarchy 


it sees them at variance with truth and reason, while 
fire and strength are for tearing them passionately 
off, because this class applauded Mr. Lowe when he 
called, or was supposed to call, the working class drunken 
and venal. 

Ill 

But when once we have begun to recount the practical 
operations by which our Liberal friends work for the re- 
moval of definite evils, and in which if we do not join them 
they are apt to grow impatient with us, how can we pass 
over that very interesting operation,—the attempt to 
enable a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister! This 
operation, too, like that for abating the feudal customs 
of succession in land, I have had the advantage of myself 
seeing and hearing my Liberal friends labour at. 

I was lucky enough to be present when Mr. Chambers 
brought forward in the House of Commons his bill for 
enabling a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister, and 
I heard the speech which Mr. Chambers then made in 
support of his bill. His first point was that God’s law,— 
the name he always gave to the Book of Leviticus,— 
did not really forbid a man to marry his deceased wife’s 
sister. God’s law not forbidding it, the Liberal maxim, 
that a man’s prime right and happiness is to do as he likes, 
ought at once to come into force, and to annul any such 
check upon the assertion of personal liberty as the prohibi- 
tion to marry one’s deceased wife’s sister. A distinguished 
Liberal supporter of Mr. Chambers, in the debate which 
followed the introduction of the bill, produced a formula 
of much beauty and neatness for conveying in brief the 
Liberal notions on this head: ‘‘Liberty,” said he, “‘is the 
law of human life.” And, therefore, the moment it is 
ascertained that God’s law, the Book of Leviticus, does 
not stop the way, man’s law, the law of liberty, asserts its 


Our Liberal Practitioners 181 


right, and makes us free to marry our deceased wife’s 
sister. 

And this exactly falls in with what Mr. Hepworth 
Dixon, who may almost be called the Colenso of love 
and marriage,—such a revolution does he make in our 
ideas on these matters, just as Dr. Colenso does in our 
ideas on religion,—tells us of the notions and proceedings 
of our kinsmen in America. With that affinity of genius 
to the Hebrew genius which we have already noticed, and 
with the strong belief of our race that liberty is the law 
of human life, so far as that fixed, perfect, and paramount 
rule of conscience, the Bible, does not expressly control 
it, our American kinsmen go again, Mr. Hepworth Dixon 
tells us, to their Bible, the Mormons to the patriarchs and 
the Old Testament, Brother Noyes to St. Paul and the 
New, and having never before read anything else but 
their Bible, they now read their Bible over again, and 
make all manner of great discoveries there. All these 
discoveries are favourable to liberty, and in this way is 
satished that double craving so characteristic of our 
Philistine, and so eminently exemplified in that crowned 
Philistine, Henry the Eighth,—the craving for forbidden 
fruit and the craving for legality. 

Mr. Hepworth Dixon’s eloquent writings give cur- 
rency, over here, to these important discoveries; so that 
now, as regards love and marriage, we seem to be entering, 
with all our sails spread, upon what Mr. Hepworth Dixon, 
its apostle and evangelist, calls a Gothic Revival, but 
what one of the many newspapers that so greatly admire 
Mr. Hepworth Dixon’s lithe and sinewy style and form 
their own style upon it, calls, by a yet bolder and more 
striking figure, “‘a great sexual insurrection of our Anglo- 
Teutonic race.” For this end we have to avert our eyes 
from everything Hellenic and fanciful, and to keep them 


=, 


182 Culture and Anarchy 


steadily fixed upon the two cardinal points of the Bible 
and liberty. And one of those practical operations in 
which the Liberal party engage, and in which we are 
summoned to join them, directs itself entirely, as we 
have seen, to these cardinal points, and may almost 
be regarded, perhaps, as a kind of first instalment, or 
public and parliamentary pledge, of the great sexual 
insurrection of our Anglo-Teutonic race. 

But here, as elsewhere, what we seek is the Philistine’s 
perfection, the development of his best self, not mere 
liberty for his ordinary self. And we no more allow abso- 
lute validity to his stock maxim, Liberty is the law of 
human life, than we allow it to the opposite maxim, which 
is just as true, Renouncement is the law of human life. For 


¢ we know that the only perfect freedom is, as our religion 
\ says, a service; not a service to any stock maxim, but an 


elevation of our best self, and a harmonising in subordina- 
tion to this, and to the idea of a perfected humanity, all 
the multitudinous, turbulent, and blind impulses of our 
ordinary selves. Now, the Philistine’s great defect being 
a defect in delicacy of perception, to cultivate in him this 
delicacy, to render it independent of external and mechan- 
ical rule, and a law to itself, is what seems to make most 
for his perfection, his true humanity. And his true 
humanity, and therefore his happiness, appears to lie 
much more, so far as the relations of love and marriage 
are concerned, in becoming alive to the finer shades of 


feeling which arise within these relations, in being able to 
‘ enter with tact and sympathy into the subtle instinctive 


propensions and repugnances of the person with whose 
life his own life is bound up, to make them his own, to 
direct and govern in harmony with them the arbitrary 
range of his personal action, and thus to enlarge his 
spiritual and intellectual life and liberty, than in remaining 


Our Liberal Practitioners 183 


insensible to these finer shades of feeling and this delicate 
sympathy, in giving unchecked range, so far as he can, 
to his mere personal action, in allowing no limits or govern- 
ment to this except such as a mechanical external law 
imposes, and in thus really narrowing, for the satisfaction 
of his ordinary self, his spiritual and intellectual life and 
liberty. 

Still more must this be so when his fixed eternal rule, 
his God’s law, is supplied to him from a source which is 
less fit, perhaps, to supply final and absolute instructions 
on this particular topic of love and marriage than on any 
other relation of human life. Bishop Wilson, who is full 
of examples of that fruitful Hellenising within the limits 
of Hebraism itself, of that renewing of the stiff and stark 
notions of Hebraism by turning upon them a stream of 
fresh thought and consciousness, which we have already 
noticed in St. Paul,—Bishop Wilson gives an admirable 
lesson to rigid Hebraisers, like Mr. Chambers, asking them- 
selves: Does God’s law (that is, the Book of Leviticus) 
forbid us to marry our wife’s sister.—Does God’s law 
(that is, again, the Book of Leviticus) allow us to marry 
our wife’s sister?—when he says: “Christian duties are. 
founded on reason, not on the sovereign authority of God 
commanding what He pleases; God cannot command us 
what 1s not fit to be believed or done, all his commands 
being founded in the necessities of our nature.” And, 
immense as is our debt to the Hebrew race and its genius, 
incomparable as is its authority on certain profoundly 
important sides of our human nature, worthy as it is to 
be described as having uttered, for those sides, the voice 
of the deepest necessities of our nature, the statutes of the 
divine and eternal order of things, the law of God,— 
who, that is not manacled and hoodwinked by his He- 
braism, can believe that, as to love and marriage, our 


Nec 
a 


a 
a 


— 


184 Culture and Anarchy 


reason and the necessities of our humanity have their true, 
sufficient, and divine law expressed for them by the voice 
of any Oriental and polygamous nation like the Hebrews? 
Who, I say, will believe, when he really considers the mat- 
ter, that where the feminine nature, the feminine ideal, and 
our relations to them, are brought into question, the deli- 
cate and apprehensive genius of the Indo-European race, 
the race which invented the Muses, and chivalry, and the 
Madonna, is to find its last word on this question in the 
institutions of a Semitic people, whose wisest king had 
seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines? 


IV 


If here again, therefore, we minister better to the 
diseased spirit of our time by leading it to think about 
the operation our Liberal friends have in hand, than by 
lending a hand to this operation ourselves, let us see, be- 
fore we dismiss from our view the practical operations of 
our Liberal friends, whether the same thing does not hold 
good as to their celebrated industrial and economical 
labours also. Their great work of this kind is, of course, 
their free-trade policy. This policy, as having enabled 


~ the poor man to eat untaxed bread, and as having wonder- 


fully augmented trade, we are accustomed to speak of 
with a kind of thankful solemnity. It is chiefly on their 
having been our leaders in this policy that Mr. Bright 
founds for himself and his friends the claim, so often 
asserted by him, to be considered guides of the blind, 
teachers of the ignorant, benefactors slowly and laboriously 
developing in the Conservative party and in the country 
that which Mr. Bright is fond of calling the growth of 
intelligence—the object, as is well known, of all the friends 
of culture also, and the great end and aim of the culture 
that we preach. 


is 


{ 


Our Liberal Practitioners 185 


Now, having first saluted free-trade and its doctors ~ 
with all respect, let us see whether even here, too, our 
Liberal friends do not pursue their operations in a mechan- 
ical way, without reference to any firm intelligible law of 
things, to human life as a whole, and human happiness; 
and whether it 1s not more for our good, at this particular 
moment at amy rate, if, instead of worshipping free-trade 
with them Hebraistically, as a kind of fetish, and helping 
them to pursue it as an end in and for itself, we turn the 
free stream of our thought upon their treatment of it, and 
see how this is related to the intelligible law of human life, 
and to national well-being and happiness. In short, 
suppose we Hellenise a little with free-trade, as we Hel- 
lenised with the Real Estate Intestacy Bill, and with the 
disestablishment of the Irish Church by the power of 
the Nonconformists’ antipathy to religious establish- 
ments, and see whether what our reprovers beautifully 
call ministering to the diseased spirit of our time is best 
done by the Hellenising method of proceeding, or by the 
other. 

But first let us understand how the policy of free- 
trade really shapes itself for our Liberal friends, and how 
they practically employ it as an instrument of national 
happiness and salvation. For as we said that it seemed 
clearly night to prevent the Church-property of Ireland 
from being all taken for the benefit of the Church of a 
small minority, so it seems clearly right that the poor man 
should eat untaxed bread, and, generally, that restrictions 
and regulations which, for the supposed benefit of some 
particular person or class of persons, make the price of 
things artificially high here, or artificially low there, and 
interfere with the natural flow of trade and commerce, 
should be done away with. But in the policy of our 
Liberal friends free-trade means more than this, and 


186 Culture and Anarchy 


is specially valued as a stimulant to the production of 
wealth, as they call it, and to the increase of the trade, 
business, and population of the country. We have already 
seen how these things,—trade, business, and population,— 
are mechanically pursued by us as ends precious in them- 
selves, and are worshipped as what we call fetishes; and 
Mr. Bright, I have already said, when he wishes to give 
the working class a true sense of what makes glory and 
greatness, tells it to look at the cities it has built, the 
railroads it has made, the manufactures it has produced. 
So to this idea of glory and greatness the free-trade which 
our Liberal friends extol so solemnly and devoutly, has 
served,—to the increase of trade, business, and population; 
and for this it is prized. Therefore, the taxing of the poor 
man’s bread has, with this view of national happiness, 
been used not so much to make the existing poor man’s 
bread cheaper or more abundant, but rather to create 
more poor men to eat it; so that we cannot precisely say 
that we have fewer poor men than we had before free- 
trade, but we can say with truth that we have many more 
centres of industry, as they are called, and much more 
business, population, and manufactures. And if we are 
sometimes a little troubled by our multitude of poor men, 
yet we know the increase of manufactures and population 
to be such a salutary thing in itself, and our free-trade 
policy begets such an admirable movement, creating 
fresh centres of industry and fresh poor men here, while 
we were thinking about our poor men there, that we are 
quite dazzled and borne away, and more and more indus- 
trial movement is called for, and our social progress seems 
to become one triumphant and enjoyable course of 
what is sometimes called, vulgarly, outrunning the con- 
stable. 

If, however, taking some other criterion of man’s well- 


Our Liberal Practitioners 187 


being than the cities he has built and the manufactures 
he has produced, we persist in thinking that our social 
progress would be happier if there were not so many of 
us so very poor, and in busying ourselves with notions 
of in some way or other adjusting the poor man and busi- 
ness one to the other, and not multiplying the one and the 
other mechanically and blindly, then our Liberal friends, 
the appointed doctors of free-trade, take us up very 
sharply. “Art is long,” says the Times, “and life is short; 
for the most part we settle things first and understand 
them afterwards. Let us have as few theories as possible; 
what 1s wanted is not the light of speculation. If nothing 
worked well of which the theory was not perfectly under- 
stood, we should be in sad confusion. ‘The relations of 
labour and capital, we are told, are not understood, yet 
trade and commerce, on the whole, work satisfactorily.” 
IJ quote from the Times of only the other day. But 
thoughts like these, as I have often pointed out, are 
thoroughly British thoughts, and we have been familiar 
with them for years. 

Or, if we want more of a philosophy of the matter than 
this, our free-trade friends have two axioms for us, ax1oms 
laid down by their justly esteemed doctors, which they 
think ought to satisfy us entirely. One is, that, other 
things being equal, the more population increases, the 
more does production increase to keep pace with it; be- 
cause men by their numbers and contact call forth all 
manner of activities and resources in one another and in) 
nature, which, when men are few and sparse, are nevet 
~ developed. The other is, that, although population always 
tends to equal the means of subsistence, yet people’s 
notions of what subsistence is enlarge as civilisation ad- 
vances, and take in a number of things beyond the bare 

1 Written in 1869, 


Di 


| 


188 Culture and Anarchy 


necessaries of life; and thus, therefore, is supplied what- 
ever check on population is needed. But the error of our 
friends is precisely, perhaps, that they apply axioms of 
this sort as if they were self-acting laws which will put 
themselves into operation without trouble or planning on 
our part, if we will only pursue free-trade, business, and 
population zealously and staunchly. Whereas the real 
truth is, that, however the case might be under other cir- 
cumstances, yet in fact, as we now manage the matter, 
the enlarged conception of what is included in subsistence 
does not operate to prevent the bringing into the world 
of numbers of people who but just attain to the barest 
‘necessaries of life or who even fail to attain to them; while, 
again, though production may increase as population 
increases, yet it seems that the production may be of such 
a kind, and so related, or rather non-related, to popula- 
tion, that the population may be little the better for it.. 
For instance, with the increase of population since 
Queen Elizabeth’s time the production of silk-stockings 
has wonderfully increased, and silk-stockings have become 
much cheaper, and procurable in greater abundance by 
many more people, and tend perhaps, as population and 
manufactures increase, to get cheaper and cheaper, and 
at last to become, according to Bastiat’s favourite image, 
a common free property of the human race, like light and 
air. But bread and bacon have not become much cheaper 
with the increase of population since Queen Elizabeth’s 
time, nor procurable in much greater abundance by many 
more people; neither do they seem at all to promise to 
become, like light and air, a common free property of the 
human race. And if bread and bacon have not kept pace 
with our population, and we have many more people in 
want of them now than in Queen Elizabeth’s time, it 
seems vain to tell us that silk-stockings have kept pace 


Our Liberal Practitioners 189 


with our population, or even more than kept pace with it, 
and that we are to get our comfort out of that. 

In short, it turns out that our pursuit of free-trade, as 
/ of so many other things, has been too mechanical. We 
| fix upon some subject, which in this case is the production 
of wealth, and the increase of manufactures, population, 
\ and commerce through free-trade as a kind of one thing 
needful, or end in itself; and then we pursue it staunchly 
and mechanically, and say that it is our duty to pursue it 
staunchly and mechanically, not to see how it is related 
to the whole intelligible law of things and to full human 
perfection, or to treat it as the piece of machinery, of 
varying value as its relations to the intelligible law of 
things vary, which it really is. 

So it is of no use to say to the J1mes, and to our Liberal 
friends rejoicing in the possession of their talisman of free- 
trade, that about one in nineteen of our population is a 
pauper,! and that, this being so, trade and commerce can 
hardly be said to prove by their satisfactory working that 
it matters nothing whether the relations between labour 
and capital are understood or not; nay, that we can hardly 
be said not to be in sad confusion. For here our faith in 
the staunch mechanical pursuit of a fixed object comes in, 
and covers itself with that imposing and colossal neces- 
sitarianism of the 7imes which we have before noticed. 
And this necessitarianism, taking for granted that an in- 
crease in trade and population is a good in itself, one of 
the chiefest of goods, tells us that disturbances of human 
happiness caused by ebbs and flows in the tide of trade 
and business, which, on the whole, steadily mounts, are 
inevitable and not to be quarrelled with. This firm philos- 
ophy I seek to call to mind when I am in the East of 
London, whither my avocations often lead me; and, indeed, 

1 This was in 1869. 


190 Culture and Anarchy 


to fortify myself against the depressing sights which on 
these occasions assail us, I have transcribed from the 
Times one strain of this kind, full of the finest economical 
doctrine, and always carry it about with me. The passage 
is this:— ) 

“The East End is the most commercial, the most in- 
dustrial, the most fluctuating region of the metropolis. 
It is always the first to suffer; for it is the creature of 
prosperity, and falls to the ground the instant there is no 
wind to bear it up. The whole of that region is covered 
with huge docks, shipyards, manufactories, and a wilder- 
ness of small houses, all full of life and happiness in brisk 
times, but in dull times withered and lifeless, like the 
deserts we read of in the East. Now their brief spring is 
over. There is no one to blame for this; it is the result 
of Nature’s simplest laws!’’ We must all agree that it is 
impossible that anything can be firmer than this, or show 
a surer faith in the working of free-trade, as our Liberal 
friends understand and employ it. 

But, if we still at all doubt whether the indefinite multi- 
plication of manufactories and small houses can be such 
an absolute good in itself as to counterbalance the in- 
definite multiplication of poor people, we shall learn that 
this multiplication of poor people, too, is an absolute good 
“in itself, and the result of divine and beautiful laws. This 
_ is indeed a favourite thesis with our Philistine friends, and 
I have already noticed the pride and gratitude with which 
they receive certain articles in the Times, dilating in thank- 
ful and solemn language on the majestic growth of our 
population. But I prefer to quote now, on this topic, the 
words of an ingenious young Scotch writer, Mr. Robert 
Buchanan, because he invests with so much imagination 
and poetry this current idea of the blessed and even divine 
character which the multiplying of population is supposed 


Our Liberal Practitioners 191 


in itself to have. ‘‘We move to multiplicity,” says Mr. 
Robert Buchanan. “If there is one quality which seems 
God’s, and his exclusively, it seems that divine philopro-- 
genitiveness, that passionate love of distribution and 
expansion into living forms. Every animal added seems 
a new ecstasy to the Maker; every life added, a new 
embodiment of his love. He would szarm the earth with 
beings. There are never enough. Life, life, life,—faces 
gleaming, hearts beating, must fill every cranny. Not a 
corner is suffered to remain empty. The whole earth 
breeds, and God glories.” 

It is a little unjust, perhaps, to attribute to the Divinity 
exclusively this philoprogenitiveness, which the British 
Philistine, and the poorer class of Irish, may certainly 
claim to share with him; yet how inspiriting is here the 
whole strain of thought! and these beautiful words, too, 
I carry about with me in the East of London, and often 
read them there. They are quite in agreement with the 
popular language one is accustomed to hear about children 
and large families, which describes children as sent. And 
a line of poetry, which Mr. Robert Buchanan throws in 
presently after the poetical prose I have quoted,— 

“Tis the old story of the fig-leaf time”’— 
this fine line, too, naturally connects itself, when one is in 
the East of London, with the idea of God’s desire to swarm 
the earth with beings; because the swarming of the earth 
with beings does indeed, in the East of London, so seem 
to revive the old story of the fig-leaf time, such a number of 
the people one meets there having hardly a rag to cover 
them; and the more the swarming goes on, the more it 
promises to revive this old story. And when the story is 
perfectly revived, the swarming quite completed, and 
every cranny choke-full, then, too, no doubt, the faces in 
the East of London will be gleaming faces, which Mr. 


rns 


192 Culture and Anarchy 


Robert Buchanan says it is God’s desire they should be, 
and which every one must perceive they are not at present, 
but, on the contrary, very miserable. 

But to prevent all this philosophy and poetry from 
quite running away with us, and making us think with 
the Times, and our practical Liberal free-traders, and 
the British Philistines generally, that the increase of 
houses and manufactories, or the increase of population, 
are absolute goods in themselves, to be mechanically 
pursued, and to be worshipped like fetishes,—to prevent 
this, we have got that notion of ours immovably fixed, 
of which I have long ago spoken, the notion that culture, 
or the study of perfection, leads us to conceive of no per- 
fection as being real which is not a general perfection, 
embracing all our fellow-men with whom we have to do. 
Such is the sympathy which binds humanity together, 
that we are, indeed, as our religion says, members of 
one body, and if one member suffer, all the members 
suffer with it. Individual perfection is impossible so 
long as the rest of mankind are not perfected along 
with us. “‘The multitude of the wise is the welfare of 
the world,” says the wise man. And to this effect that 
excellent and often-quoted guide of ours, Bishop Wilson, 
has some striking words:—‘“It is not,” says he, ‘so 
much our neighbour’s interest as our own that we love 
him.” And again he says: ‘Our salvation does in some 
measure depend upon that of others.”” And the author 
of the Imitation puts the same thing admirably when he 
says:—“Obscurior etiam via ad celum videbatur quando 
tam pauct regnum celorum querere curabant; the fewer 
there are who follow the way to perfection, the harder 
that way is to find.” So all our fellow-men, in the East 
of London and elsewhere, we must take along with us | 
in the progress towards perfection, if we ourselves really, 


——— 


en 


Our Liberal Practitioners 193 


as we profess, want to be perfect; and we must not let 
the worship of any fetish, any machinery, such as manu- 
factures or population,—which are not, like perfection, 
absolute goods in themselves, though we think them 
so,—create for us such a multitude of miserable, sunken, 
and ignorant human beings, that to carry them all along 
\ with us is impossible, and perforce they must for the most 
part be left by us in their degradation and wretchedness. 
But evidently the conception of free-trade, on which our 
Liberal friends vaunt themselves, and in which they 
think they have found the secret of national prosperity,— 
evidently, I say, the mere unfettered pursuit of the pro- 
duction of wealth, and the mere mechanical multiplying, 
for this end, of manufactures and population, threatens 
to create for us, if it has not created already, those vast, 
miserable, unmanageable masses of sunken people, to 
the existence of which we are, as we have seen, absolutely 
forbidden to reconcile ourselves, in spite of all that the 
philosophy of the Times and the poetry of Mr. Robert 
Buchanan may say to persuade us. 

Hebraism in general seems powerless, almost as power- 
less as our free-trading Liberal friends, to deal efiicaciously 
with our ever-accumulating masses of pauperism, and 
to prevent their accumulating still more. Hebraism 
builds churches, indeed, for these masses, and sends 
missionaries among them; above all, it sets itself against 
the social necessitarianism of the Times, and refuses to 
accept their degradation as inevitable. But with regard 
to their ever-increasing accumulation, it seems to be led 
to the very same conclusions, though from a point of 
view of its own, as our free-trading Liberal friends. 
Hebraism, with that mechanical and misleading use of 
the letter of Scripture on which we have already com- 
mented, is governed by such texts as: Be fruitful and 


194 Culture and Anarchy 


multiply, the edict of God’s law, as Mr. Chambers would 
say; or by the declaration of what he would call God’s 
word in the Psalms, that the man who has a great num- 
ber of children is thereby made happy. And in con- 
junction with such texts as these, Hebraism is apt to 
place another text: The poor shall never cease out of the 
land. Thus Hebraism is conducted to nearly the same 
notion as the popular mind and as Mr. Robert Buchanan, 
that children are sent, and that the divine nature takes 
a delight in swarming the East End of London with 
paupers. Only, when they are perishing in their help- 
lessness and wretchedness, it asserts the Christian duty 
of succouring them, instead of saying, like the Times: 
“Now their brief spring is over; there is nobody to blame 
for this; it is the result of Nature’s simplest laws!” But, 
like the Times, Hebraism despairs of any help from 
knowledge and says that “what is wanted is not the 
light of speculation.” 

I remember, only the other day, a good man looking 
with me upon a multitude of children who were gathered 
before us in one of the most miserable regions of London,— 
children eaten up with disease, half sized, half-fed, half- 
clothed, neglected by their parents, without health, with- 
out home, without hope,—said to me: “The one thing 
really needful is to teach these little ones to succour one 
another, if only with a cup of cold water; but now, from 
one end of the country to the other, one hears nothing 
but the cry for knowledge, knowledge, knowledge!” 
And yet surely, so long as these children are there in these 
festering masses, without health, without home, without 
hope, and so long as their multitude is perpetually swelling, 
charged with misery they must still be for themselves, 
charged with misery they must still be for us, whether they 
help one another with a cup of cold water or no; and the 


Our Liberal Practitioners 195 


knowledge how to prevent their accumulating is necessary, 
even to give their moral life and growth a fair chance! 
May we not, therefore, say, that neither the true 
Hebraism of this good man, willing to spend and be 
spent for these sunken multitudes, nor what I may call 
the spurious Hebraism of our free-trading Liberal friends, 
—mechanically worshipping their fetish of the produc- 
tion of wealth and of the increase of manufactures and 
population, and looking neither to the right nor left so 
long as this increase goes on,—avail us much here; and 
that here, again, what we want is Hellenism, the letting 
our consciousness play freely and simply upon the facts 
before us, and listening to what it tells us of the intelligible 
law of things as concerns them? And surely what it 
tells us is, that a man’s children are not really sent, any 
more than the pictures upon his wall, or the horses in 
his stable are sent; and that to bring people into the 
world, when one cannot afford to keep them and oneself 
decently and not too precariously, or to bring more of 
them into the world than one can afford to keep thus, 
is, whatever the Times and Mr. Robert Buchanan may 
say, by no means an accomplishment of the divine will 
or a fulfilment of Nature’s simplest laws, but is just as 
wrong, just as contrary to reason and the will of God, 
as for a man to have horses, or carriages, or pictures, 
when he cannot afford them, or to have more of them 
than he can afford; and that, in the one case as in the 
other, the larger scale on which the violation of reason’s 
law is practised, and the longer it is persisted in, the 
greater must be the confusion and final trouble. Surely 
no laudations of free-trade, no meetings of bishops and 
clergy in the East End of London, no reading of papers 
and reports, can tell us anything about our social condi- 
tion which it more concerns us to know than that! and 


196 Culture and Anarchy 


not only to know, but habitually to have the knowledge 
present, and to act upon it as one acts upon the knowl- 
edge that water wets and fire burns! And not only the 
sunken populace of our great cities are concerned to 
know it, and the pauper twentieth of our population; 
we Philistines of the middle class, too, are concerned 
to know it, and all who have to set themselves to make 
progress in perfection. 

But we all know it already! some one will say; it is 
the simplest law of prudence. But how little reality 
must there be in our knowledge of it; how little can we 
be putting it in practice; how little is it likely to pene- 
trate among the poor and struggling masses of our popu- 
lation, and to better our condition, so long as an unin- 
telligent Hebraism of one sort keeps repeating as an 
absolute eternal word of God the psalm-verse which says 
that the man who has a great many children 1s happy; 
for an unintelligent Hebraism of another sort,—that is 
/to say, a blind following of certain stock notions as in- 
. fallible,—keeps assigning as an absolute proof of national 
prosperity the multiplying of manufactures and popula- 
tion! Surely, the one set of Hebraisers have to learn 
that their psalm-verse was composed at the resettle- 
ment of Jerusalem after the Captivity, when the Jews 
of Jerusalem were a handful, an undermanned garrison, 
and every child was a blessing; and that the word of 
God, or the voice of the divine order of things, declares 
the possession of a great many children to be a blessing 
only when it really is so! And the other set of Hebraisers, 
have they not to learn that if they call their private ac- 
quaintances imprudent or unlucky, when, with no means 
of support for them or with precarious means, they have 
a large family of children, then they ought not to call 
the State well managed and prosperous merely because 


Our Liberal Practitioners 197 


its manufactures and its citizens multiply, if the manu- 
factures, which bring new citizens into existence just as 
much as if they had actually begotten them, bring more 
of them into existence than they can maintain, or are 
too precarious to go on maintaining those whom for a 
while they maintained? 

Hellenism, surely, or the habit of fixing our mind upon 
the intelligible law of things, is most salutary if it makes 
us see that the only absolute good, the only absolute 
and eternal object prescribed to us by God’s law, or the 
divine order of things, is the progress towards perfection,— 
our own progress towards it and the progress of human- 
ity. And therefore, for every individual man, and for 
every society of men, the possession and multiplication 
of children, like the possession and multiplication of 
horses and pictures, is to be accounted good or bad, not 
in itself, but with reference to this object and the prog- 
ress towards it. And as no man is to be excused in 
having horses or pictures, if his having them hinders 
his own or others’ progress towards perfection and makes 
them lead a servile and ignoble life, so is no man to be 
excused for having children if his having them makes 
him or others lead this. Plain thoughts of this kind are 
surely the spontaneous product of our consciousness, 
when it is allowed to play freely and disinterestedly 
upon the actual facts of our social condition, and upon 
our stock notions and stock habits in respect to it. Firmly 
grasped and simply uttered, they are more likely, one 
cannot but think, to better that condition, than is the 
mechanical pursuit of free-trade by our Liberal friends. 


\" 


So -that, here as elsewhere, the practical operations 
of our Liberal friends, by which they set so much store, 


— 


198 Culture and Anarchy 


and in which they invite us to join them and to show 
what Mr. Bright calls a commendable interest, do not 
seem to us so practical for real good as they think; and 
our Liberal friends seem to us themselves to need to 
Hellenise, as we say, a little,—that is, to examine into 
the nature of real good, and to listen to what their con- 
sciousness tells them about it,—rather than to pursue 
with such heat and confidence their present practical 
operations. And it is clear that they have no just cause, 
so far as regards several operations of theirs which we 
have canvassed, to reproach us with delicate Conserva- 
tive scepticism. For often by Hellenising we seem to 
subvert stock Conservative notions and usages more 
effectually than they subvert them by Hebraising. But, 
in truth, the free spontaneous play of consciousness with 
which culture tries to float our stock habits of thinking 
and acting, is by its very nature, as has been said, dis- 
interested. Sometimes the result of floating them may 
be agreeable to this party, sometimes to that; now it 
may be unwelcome to our so-called Liberals, now to our 
so-called Conservatives; but what culture seeks is, above 
all, to float them, to prevent their being stiff and stark 
pieces of petrifaction any longer. It is mere Hebraising, 
if we stop short, and refuse to let our consciousness play 
freely, whenever we or our friends do not happen to like 
what it discovers to us. This is to make the Liberal 
party, or the Conservative party, our one thing needful, 
instead of human perfection; and we have seen what 
mischief arises from making an even greater thing than 


‘the Liberal or the Conservative party,—the predomi- 


nance of the moral side in man,—our one thing needful. 


\.But wherever the free play of our consciousness leads 


us, we shall follow; believing that in this way we shall 
tend to make good at all points what is wanting to us, 


Our Liberal Practitioners 199 


and so shall be brought nearer to our complete human 
perfection. 

Everything, in short, confirms us in the doctrine, 
so unpalatable to the believers in action, that our main 
business at the present moment is not so much to work 
away at certain crude reforms of which we have already 
the scheme in our own mind, as to create, through the 
help of that culture which at the very outset we began 
by praising and recommending, a frame of mind out of 
which the schemes of really fruitful reforms may with time 
grow. At any rate, we ourselves must put up with our 
friends’ impatience, and with their reproaches against 
cultivated inaction, and must still decline to lend a hand 
to their practical operations, until we, for our own part, 
at least, have grown a little clearer about the nature of 
real good, and have arrived nearer to a condition of mind 
out of which really fruitful and solid operations may 
spring. 

In the meanwhile, since our Liberal friends keep loudly 
and resolutely assuring us that their actual operations at 
present are fruitful and solid, let us in each case keep 
testing these operations in the simple way we have in- 
dicated, by letting the natural stream of our consciousness 
flow over them freely; and if they stand this test success- 
fully, then let us give them our interest, but not else. 


CONCLUSION 


AND so we bring to an end what we had to say in praise of 
culture, and in evidence of its special utility for the cir- 
cumstances in which we find ourselves, and the confusion 
which environs us. Through culture seems to lie our way, 
not only to perfection, but even to safety. Resolutely 
refusing to lend a hand to the imperfect operations of our 
Liberal friends, disregarding their impatience, taunts, and 
reproaches, firmly bent on trying to find in the intelligible 
laws of things a firmer and sounder basis for future practice 
than any which we have at present, and believing this 
search and discovery to be, for our generation and cir- 
cumstances, of yet more vital and pressing importance 
than practice itself, we nevertheless may do more, per- 
haps, we poor disparaged followers of culture, to make the 
actual present, and the frame of society in which we live, 
solid and seaworthy, than all which our bustling politicians 
can do. 

For we have seen how much of our disorders and 
perplexities is due to the disbelief, among the classes and 
combinations of men, Barbarian or Philistine, which have 
hitherto governed our society, in right reason, in a para- 
mount best self; to the inevitable decay and break-up of 
the organisations by which, asserting and expressing in 
these organisations their ordinary self only, they have so 
long ruled us; and to their irresolution, when the society, 
which their conscience tells them they have made and still 
manage not with right reason but with their ordinary self, 
is rudely shaken, in offering resistance to its subverters. 
But for us,—who believe in right reason, in the duty 
and possibility of extricating and elevating our best 

200 


Conclusion 201 


self, in the progress of humanity towards perfection,— 
for us the framework of society, that theatre on which 
this august drama has to unroll itself, is sacred; and who- 
ever administers it, and however we may seek to remove 
them from their tenure of administration, yet, while 
they administer, we steadily and with undivided heart 
support them in repressing anarchy and disorder; because 
without order there can be no society, and without society 
there can be no human perfection. 

And this opinion of the intolerableness of anarchy 
we can never forsake, however our Liberal friends may 
think a little rioting, and what they call popular demon- 
_Strations, useful sometimes to their own interests and to 
the interests of the valuable practical operations they have 
in hand, and however they may preach the right of an 
Englishman to be left to do as far as possible what he likes, 
and the duty of his government to indulge him and connive 
as much as possible and abstain from all harshness of 
repression. And even when they artfully show us opera- 
tions which are undoubtedly precious, such as the aboli- 
tion of the slave-trade, and ask us if, for their sake, foolish 
and obstinate governments may not wholesomely be 
frightened by a little disturbance, the good design in 
view and the difficulty of overcoming opposition to it 
being considered,—still we say no, and that monster- 
processions in the streets and forcible irruptions into 
the parks, even in professed support of this good design, 
ought to be unflinchingly forbidden and repressed; and 
that far more is lost than is gained by permitting them. 
Because a State in which law is authoritative and sover- 
eign, a firm and settled course of public order, is requisite 
if man is to bring to maturity anything precious and last- 
ing now, or to found anything precious and lasting for the 
future. 


202 Culture and Anarchy 


Thus, in our eyes, the very framework and exterior 
order of the State, whoever may administer the State, is 


/sacred; and culture is the most resolute enemy of anarchy, 
_ because of the great hopes and designs for the State which 
\culture teaches us to nourish. But as, believing in right 


reason, and having faith in the progress of humanity to- 
wards perfection, and ever labouring for this end, we grow 
to have clearer sight of the ideas of mght reason, and of 
the elements and helps of perfection, and come gradually 
to fill the framework of the State with them, to fashion 
its internal composition and all its laws and institutions 
conformably to them, and to make the State more and 
more the expression, as we say, of our best self, which is 
not manifold, and vulgar, and unstable, and contentious, 
and ever-varying, but one, and noble, and secure, and 
peaceful, and the same for all mankind,—with what 
aversion shall we not then regard anarchy, with what 
firmness shall we not check it, when there is so much that 
is so precious which it will endanger! 

So that, for the sake of the present, but far more for the 
sake of the future, the lovers of culture are unswervingly 
and with a good conscience the opposers of anarchy. And 
not as the Barbarians and Philistines, whose honesty and 
whose sense of humour make them shrink, as we have seen, 


“from treating the State as too serious a thing, and from 


giving it too much power;—for indeed the only State 


_they know of, and think they administer, is the expression 


of their ordinary self. And though the headstrong and 
violent extreme among them might gladly arm this with 
full authority, yet their virtuous mean is, as we have said, 
pricked in conscience at doing this; and as our Barbarian 
Secretaries of State let the Park railings be broken down, 
and our Philistine Alderman-Colonels let the London 
roughs rob and beat the bystanders. But we, beholding 


Conclusion 203 


in the State no expression of our ordinary self, but even 
already, as it were, the appointed frame and prepared 
vessel of our best self, and, for the future, our best self’s 
powerful, beneficent, and sacred expression and organ,— 
we are willing and resolved, even now, to strengthen 
against anarchy the trembling hands of our Barbarian 
Home Secretaries, and the feeble knees of our Philistine 
Alderman-Colonels; and to tell them, that it is not really 
in behalf of their own ordinary self that they are called to 
protect the Park railings, and to suppress the London 
roughs, but in behalf of the best self both of themselves 
and of all of us in the future. 

Nevertheless, though for resisting anarchy the lovers 
of culture may prize and employ fire and strength, yet 
they must, at the same time, bear constantly in mind that 
it is not at this moment true, what the majority of people 
tell us, that the world wants fire and strength more than 
sweetness and light, and that things are for the most part 
to be settled first and understood afterwards. We have 
seen how much of our present perplexities and confusion 
this untrue notion of the majority of people amongst us 
has caused, and tends to perpetuate. Therefore the true 
business of the friends of culture now is, to dissipate this 
false notion, to spread the belief in right reason and in a 
firm intelligible law of things, and to get men to try, in 
preference to staunchly acting with imperfect knowledge, 
to obtain some sounder basis of knowledge on which to 
act. This is what the friends and lovers of culture have 
to do, however the believers in action may grow im- 
patient with us for saying so, and may insist on our lend- 
ing a hand to their practical operations and showing a 
commendable interest in them. 

To this insistence we must indeed turn a deaf ear. 
But neither, on the other hand, must the friends of culture 


204 Culture and Anarchy 


expect to take the believers in action by storm, or to be 
visibly and speedily important, and to rule and cut a 
figure in the world. Aristotle says that those for whom 
alone ideas and the pursuit of the intelligible law of things 
can, in general, have much attraction, are principally the 
young, filled with generous spirit and with a passion for 
perfection; but the mass of mankind, he says, follow seem- 
ing goods for real, bestowing hardly a thought upon true 
sweetness and light;—‘‘and to their lives,’ he adds 
mournfully, “who can give another and a better rhythm?” 
But, although those chiefly attracted by sweetness and 
light will probably always be the young and enthusiastic, 
and culture must not hope to take the mass of mankind 
by storm, yet we will not therefore, for our own day and 
for our own people, admit and rest in the desponding 
sentence of Aristotle. For is not this the right crown of 
the long discipline of Hebraism, and the due fruit of man- 
kind’s centuries of painful schooling in  self-conquest, 
and the just reward, above all, of the strenuous energy of 
our own nation and kindred in dealing honestly with it- 
self and walking steadfastly according to the best light 
it knows,—that when in the fulness of time it has reason 
and beauty offered to it, and the law of things as they 
really are, it should at last walk by this true light with 
the same staunchness and zeal with which it formerly 
walked by its imperfect light? And thus man’s two great 
natural forces, Hebraism and Hellenism, will no longer be 
. dissociated and rival, but will be a joint force of right 
thinking and strong doing to carry him on towards perfec- 
tion. This is what the lovers of culture may perhaps dare 
to augur for such a nation as ours. 

Therefore, however great the changes to be accom- 
plished, and however dense the array of Barbarians, 
Philistines, and Populace, we will neither despair on 


Conclusion 205 


the one hand, nor, on the other, threaten violent revolu- 
tion and change. But we will look forward cheerfully 
and hopefully to “‘a revolution,” as the Duke of Wellington 
said, ““by due course of law;” though not exactly such 
laws as our Liberal friends are now, with their actual 
lights, fond of offering to us. 

But if despondency and violence are both of them for- 
bidden to the believer in culture, yet neither, on the other 
hand, is public life and direct political action much per- 
mitted to him. For it is his business, as we have seen, to 
get the present believers in action, and lovers of political 
talking and doing, to make a return upon their own minds, 
scrutinise their stock notions and habits much more, value 
their present talking and doing much less; in order that, 
by learning to think more clearly, they may come at last 
to act less confusedly. But how shall we persuade our 
Barbarian to hold lightly to his feudal usages; how shall 
we persuade our Nonconformist that his time spent in 
agitating for the abolition of church-establishments would 
have been better spent in getting worthier ideas of God 
and the ordering of the world, or his time spent in battling 
for voluntaryism in education better spent in learning to 
value and found a public and national culture; how shall 
we persuade, finally, our Alderman-Colonel not to be 
content with sitting in the hall of judgment or marching 
at the head of his men of war, without some knowledge 
how to perform judgment and how to direct men of war, 
—how, I say, shall we persuade all these of this, if our 
Alderman-Colonel sees that we want to get his leading- 
staff and his scales of justice for our own hands; or the 
Nonconformist, that we want for ourselves his platform; 
or the Barbarian, that we want for ourselves his pre- 
eminency and function? Certainly they will be less slow 
to believe, as we want them to believe, that the intelligible 


206 Culture and Anarchy 


law of things has in itself something desirable and precious, 
and that all place, function, and bustle are hollow goods 
without it, if they see that we ourselves can content our- 
selves with this law, and find in itt our satisfaction, without 
making it an instrument to give us for ourselves place, 
function, and bustle. 

And although Mr. Sidgwick says that social usefulness 
really means “‘losing oneself in a mass of disagreeable, hard, 
mechanical details,” and though all the believers in action 

are fond of asserting the same thing, yet, as to lose our- 
selves is not what we want, but to find ourselves through 
finding the intelligible law of things, this assertion too we 
shall not blindly accept, but shall sift and try it a little 
first. And if we see that because the believers in action, 
forgetting Goethe’s maxim, “to act 1s easy, to think is 
hard,” imagine there is some wonderful virtue in losing 
oneself in a mass of mechanical details, therefore they 
excuse themselves from much thought about the clear 
ideas which ought to govern these details, then we shall give 
our chief care and pains to seeking out those ideas and to 
setting them forth; being persuaded that if we have the 
ideas firm and clear, the mechanical details for their execu- 
tion will come a great deal more simply and easily than 
we now suppose. 

At this exciting juncture, then, while so many of the 
lovers of new ideas, somewhat weary, as we too are, of the 
stock performances of our Liberal friends upon the politi- 
cal stage, are disposed to rush valiantly upon this public 
stage themselves, we cannot at all think that for a wise 
lover of new ideas this stage is the right one. Plenty of 
people there will be without us,—country gentlemen in 
search of a club, demagogues in search of a tub, lawyers 
in search of a place, industrialists in search of gentility,— 
who will come from the east and from the west, and will 


Conclusion 207 


sit down at that Thyestean banquet of clap-trap which 
English public life for these many years past has been. 
And, so long as those old organisations, of which we have 
seen the insufliciency,—those expressions of our ordinary 
self, Barbarian or Philistine,—have force anywhere, they 
will have force in Parliament. There, the man whom the 
Barbarians send, cannot but be impelled to please the 
Barbarians’ ordinary self, and their natural taste for the 
bathos: and the man whom the Philistines send, cannot 
but be impelled to please those of the Philistines. Parlia- 
mentary Conservatism will and must long mean this, that _ 
the Barbarians should keep their heritage; and Parlia- 
mentary Liberalism, that the Barbarians should pass away, 
as they will pass away, and that into their heritage the 
Philistines should enter. This seems, indeed, to be the 
true and authentic promise of which our Liberal friends 
and Mr. Bright believe themselves the heirs, and the goal 
of that great man’s labours. Presently, perhaps, Mr. 
Odger and Mr. Bradlaugh will be there with their mission 
to oust both Barbarians and Philistines, and to get the 
heritage for the Populace. 

We, on the other hand, are for giving the heritage 
neither to the Barbarians nor to the Philistines, nor yet 
to the Populace; but we are for the transformation of each 
and all of these according to the law of perfection. Through 
the length and breadth of our nation a sense,—vague and 
obscure as yet,—of weariness with the old organisations, 
of desire for this transformation, works and grows. In 
the House of Commons the old organisations must in- 
evitably be most enduring and strongest, the transforma- 
tion must inevitably be longest in showing itself; and it 
may truly be averred, therefore, that at the present 
juncture the centre of movement is not in the House of 
Commons. It is in the fermenting mind of the nation; 


208 Culture and Anarchy 


and his is for the next twenty years the real influence who 
can address himself to this. 

Pericles was perhaps the most perfect public speaker 
who ever lived, for he was the man who most perfectly 
combined thought and wisdom with feeling and eloquence. 
Yet Plato brings in Alcibiades declaring, that men went 
away from the oratory of Pericles, saying it was very fine, 
it was very good, and afterwards thinking no more about 
it; but they went away from hearing Socrates talk, he 
says, with the point of what he had said sticking fast in 
their minds, and they could not get rid of it. Socrates has 
drunk his hemlock and is dead; but in his own breast does 
not every man carry about with him a possible Socrates, 
in that power of a disinterested play of consciousness upon 
his stock notions and habits, of which this wise and admir- 
able man gave all through his lifetime the great example, 
and which was the secret of his incomparable influence? 
And he who leads men to call forth and exercise in them- 
selves this power, and who busily calls it forth and exer- 
cises it in himself, is at the present moment, perhaps, as 
Socrates was in his time, more in concert with the vital 
working of men’s minds, and more effectually significant, 
than any House of Commons’ orator, or practical operator 
in politics. 

Every one is now boasting of what he has done to edu- 
cate men’s minds and to give things the course they are 
taking. Mr. Disraeli educates, Mr. Bright educates, Mr. 
Beales educates. We, indeed, pretend to educate no one, 
for we are still engaged in trying to clear and educate our- 
selves. But we are sure that the endeavour to reach, 
through culture, the firm intelligible law of things, we are 
sure that the detaching ourselves from our stock notions 
and habits, that a more free play of consciousness, an 
increased desire for sweetness and light, and all the bent 


Conclusion 209 


which we call Hellenising, is the master impulse even now 
of the life of our nation and of humanity,—somewhat 
obscurely perhaps for this actual moment, but decisively 
and certainly for the immediate future; and that those 
who work for this are the sovereign educators. 

Docile echoes of the eternal voice, pliant organs of the 
infinite will, such workers are going along with the essential 
movement of the world; and this is their strength, and 
their happy and divine fortune. For if the believers in 
action, who are so impatient with us and call us effeminate, 
had had the same good fortune, they would, no doubt, have 
surpassed us in this sphere of vital influence by all the 
superiority of their genius and energy over ours. But 
now we go the way the human race is going, while they 
abolish the Irish Church by the power of the Noncon- 
formists’ antipathy to establishments, or they enable a 
man to marry his deceased wife’s sister. 





NOTES 


Page 39. ‘‘I have before now ’’—viz. in “The Function of Criticism at 
the Present Time,” p. 16. 


Page 46. ““I have before now, etc.” viz. in “The Function of 
Cniticism at the Present Time,” Essays in Criticism, rst Series, p. 21. 


Page 46. Roebuck, John Arthur (1801-1879), Member of Parlia- 
ment for Sheffield, 1848-1868 and 1874-1879, was a disciple and 
friend of John Stuart Mill, the liberal philosopher. Roebuck was a 
radical in questions of domestic policy, and during his parliamentary 
career was characterised by his independence and vehemence in 
public address. Matthew Arnold ridicules his position in “The 
Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” see p. 21. 


Page 58. Beales, Edmund (1803-1881), educated at Trinity College, 
Cambridge, was a political agitator who became President of the 
Reform League and was involved in the Hyde Park Riots in July, 
1866. An account of his experiences in that episode is given in 
Justin Huntley McCarthy’s “History of our own Time,” Vol. II, 


p- 342. 


Page 58. Bradlaugh, Charles (1833-1891) was a prominent advocate 
of free thought and proprietor of The National Reformer He was 
active in the agitation for the reform of parliament in 1866-1867 
and a member of the Reform League making many earnest speeches 
for the cause. In 1880, he was refused a seat in Parliament because 
he would not conform to the practice of taking the oath on Scripture, 
took his case to law, was re-elected and finally permitted to sit in 
the House of Commons. 


Page 59. Lowe, Robert (1811-1892), first Viscount Sherbrooke, edu- 
cated at Winchester and University College, Oxford, Member of 
Parliament for Calne 1859-1867, was Vice-President of the Com- 
mission on Education, 1859-1864. He made some very striking 
speeches during the debates on parliamentary reform in 1866. 


Page 62. Congreve, Richard (1818-1899), educated at Rugby and 
Wadham College, Oxford, where after he took his degree of M. A. 
in 1843 he was for a few years a tutor. In Panis in 1848 he met the 


211 


212 Notes 


French social thinkers, St. Hilaire and Comte, who won him to 
Positivism, or “the Religion of Humanity.” Congreve established 
Positivism in England as a religious sect and founded the Positivist 
Temple in London in 1855. 


Page 70. “My young Prussian friend ’—viz. Arminius vor Thun- 
der-ten-Tronkh of Arnold’s “ Fmnendship’s Garland.” 


Page 77. “The Hyde Park rioter’’—The account of the Hyde Park 
riots is given by Justin Huntley McCarthy in his “History of 
our own Time” (vol. II, p. 342) as follows: “On July 9th Lord 
Derby was able to announce to the Peers that he had put together 
his house of cards. The New Ministry had hardly taken their seats 
when a perfect storm of agitation broke out all over the country. . . 
Reform Leagues and Reform Unions started up as if out of the 
ground. Public meetings of vast dimensions began to be held day 
after day for the purpose of testifying to the strength of the desire 
for Reform. The most noteworthy of these was the famous Hyde 
Park meeting. The Reformers of the metropolis determined to 
hold a monster meeting in the Park. The authorities took the very 
unwise course of determining to prohibit it. The Reformers were 
acting under the advice of Mr. Edmund Beales, President of the 
Reform League, a barrister of some standing, and a man of character 
and considerable ability. Mr. Beales was of opinion that the author- 
ities had no legal power to prevent the meeting; . . . The London 
Reformers, therefore, determined to try their right with the author- 
ities. On July 23rd, a number of processions, marching with bands 
and banners, set out from different parts of London and made for 
Hyde Park. The authorities had posted notices announcing that 
the gates of the Park would be closed at five o’clock that evening. 
When the first of the processions arrived at the Park the gates were 
closed, and a line of policemen was drawn up outside.” When, the 
historian continues, Mr. Beales came up in a carriage, and demanded 
the reason for the exclusion of the agitators, he was told that the 
London authorities had so ordered. He then went to Trafalgar 
Square, followed by many of the paraders, but during an extempo- 
rized meeting there, the crowd which surrounded Hyde Park became 
so dense that the police could not control it. One man in the crowd 
who began shaking the Park railing inspired others to do the same so 
that as the vast mob surged against it the railing finally yielded, the 
paraders pressed forward into the forbidden ground, and soon 
swarmed all over it. In the attempts made by the police to clear 
the place, stones were thrown, and clubs wielded, and in the excite- 
ment, it was supposed that a revolution had broken out, but, said 
Mr.. McCarthy, “there was no revolution, no revolt, no serious 


Notes 218 


riot, even. . . . The sudden tumult was harmlessly over, and the 
one personage whose impulse first shook the railings of the Park 
may even now console himself in his security by the thought that 
his push carried Reform.” The Government, in other words, was 
prompted immediately to act, the ultimate result of which was the 
Second Reform Bill of 1867. 


Page 85. Miall, Edward (1809-1881), a clergyman who founded the 
religious paper, “The Non-Conformist,” which had for its motto 
the phrase Arnold often alludes to, “the dissidence of dissent and 
the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.” He was also very 
prominent in the agitation for the disestablishment of the Irish 
Church. He was a member of Parliament for Bradford, for which 
he sat with Matthew Arnold’s brother-in-law, William E. Forster, 
author of the great English Education Act of 1870, and with whom 
he frequently disagreed on matters pertaining to Church and edu- 
cational legislation. 


Page 91. Odger, George (1820-1877), a shoemaker who became sec~ 
retary to the London Trades Council in 1862. He believed in 
political action for Trades Unions, and made five unsuccessful 
efforts to be elected to Parliament. He made a considerable con- 
temporary reputation as leader of the London workmen and was 
frequently before the public notice. 


Page 170. “‘What we have formerly said about... Miss Cobbe 
and the British College of Health,”—viz. in “The Function of 
Criticism at the Present time,” pp. 30-33. 








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